Science Fantasy v22n65 (June July 1964)

SCIENCE

F A N TA S Y

FIVE NEW LONG STORIES

Volume 22

PINK PLASTIC GODS ^

By Brian W. Aldiss Number 65

THE CONTRAPTION
By Keimeth Bulmer

JUNE — JULY

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JUNE AND JULY 1964 Vol22 No 65

SCIENCE

EANTASY

Edited by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Contents

Editorial 2

“ Science Fantasy ” by Peter Levi 4

Pink Plastic Gods by Brian W. Aldiss 5

The Contraption by Kenneth Bulmer 22

Blast Off 55

Competition 59

LAZARUS by Joel Crackeh 60

Unauthorised Persons by John Runciman 79

Matchbox by Peter Bradley 113

The Great Chan by Archie Potts 125

Published every other month by Roberts & Vinter Ltd.,
44 Milkwood Rd., London, S.E.24. Subscriptions 17/-
(13.00) post free per year.

All communications (sendf/’s risk) to The Editor, SF,
18 Norham Gardens, Oxforu. All terrestrial characters and
places are fictitious. (£) 1964 by Science Fantasy.

Printed by the Rugby Advertiser Ltd., Cattle Street, Rugby.

2

Editorial . . .

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Of course I could just pretend that nothing had
happened and that Science Fantasy hadn’t changed hands,
editors and format all in one inter-issue period. But if
you are the kind of reader who looks at the Editorial at
all you will know that all this has happened and will
probably expect some sort of comment — perhaps some
promise for the future or a manifesto of editorid policy
and beliefs. So here is something of the sort.

There is every intention of keeping this magazine going
and, indeed, increasing its frequency if this can be done.
It largely rests with you: and wiA the economic cycle
which starts with your silver, in your trouser pocket.
Every time you miss buying an issue, every time you
borrow a number or hberate it from a friend’s bookshelf,
you strike a half-crown blow at a living organ of s-f in
this country. Make no mistake: it is here, in the pulp
magazines, that s-f has its essential roots, here that young
writers first get a decent crack of the whip. Enthusiasts’
clubs and conventions are excellent in their way but what
s-f in this country needs above all is circulation. I realise
that England hasn’t the population of the USA; I’m
not thinking of a circulation rise in the tens of thousands.
A rise of even three or four thousand an issue would
enable us to offer rates comparable with those earned
by writers in America: we could then compete at the
top of the manuscript market and make it worthwhile
for the rising young writer to look in the s-f direction.

There is far too much talk about s-f and far too little
of it being written. Until I took on this magazine and
started reading manuscripts I had thought, as no doubt
many of you do, that there was a mass of first-class stuff
pining away in drawers while the wrong-headed, perverse
editors printed reader-losing rubbish. I was wrong. I have
just read through a quarter of a million words of MS
and half of it was so bad it made me blush. And I don’t
blush very easily. You loyal, stalwart readers who go on
writing candid, well-reasoned, patient letters explaining
exactly what you would like to be reading are wasting

Editorial

3

your time. No-one over here is writing that stuff, or, if
they are, they aren’t selling it in England. Except, per-
haps, in the form of full-length novels.

So, when next you have the urge to write “ Dear Sir ” —
write “ dear reader ” instead and try your own hand at the
thankless, unrewarding task of writing s-f. I undertake
faithfully to give very special consideration to any first
attempts by readers, and, if we print any, to pay the most
encouraging rates the kitty will stand. (But write your
letter to the editor as well: I shall rely very much on
your comments and criticism for the next few issues.)

« * « «

I know this will make some enemies, but it had better
be said. I don’t believe that there is any such genre as
science-fantasy. It is either, at its best, off-beat science-
fiction with a touch of poetry or, at its worst, degraded
science-fiction, in which the author wriggles out of his
plot-difficulties by introducing “ mystic ” or “ transcen-
dental ” elements (and there’s a pair of suspect words!)
just as an idle writer of straight s-f gets over the hurdles
in his ill-made plot by dragging in another improbable
machine. Mind, there’s nothing wrong with the improb-
able machine so long as it is integral to the story: apart
from the basic s-f allowance of a post-Einstein physics
the writer is, I feel, allowed one basic stride forward in
science or technology around which to construct his story
(if it’s that kind of story). Thus you can write about what
happens when a space-missionary recklessly uses a cyber-
netic speech-translator to tell the aliens how sinful they
are (Katherine MacLean’s Unhuman Sacrifice) but, when
you’ve got him into a tight comer, you must not let him
hop into a handy matter-transmitter: unless the whole
secondary point of the story is that he can.

What you really cannot do — if you are writing for
adults — is have a Venusian princess materialise out of the
air, offering to free your hero from the BEM’s clutches
if he will come to Krzk and kill the wicked High Priest
of Zoz with the magic sword of Ugg. Ugh.

My editorial watchword, then, is “ Science Fiction for
Grown-Ups! ” I hope I shall be able to make it hold
good.

4

SCIENCE FANTASY

Dragon-lovers with sweet serious eyes
brood in a desert wood sick with bluebells :
the tough fire-belching curiosities
mate among ugly smoke and pungent smells.

Seal-women linger on the wild foreshore
where in the wrack and foot- prints of

green slime

doe-eyed enormous weed-eaters explore
pebbles and sand, and then begin to climb.

I belong to the Monster Society,
they are my only ramshackle heroes,

I really love them and whenever / see
monster films I cheer them from the

back rows.

I like steam tractors and big,

broken machines,

have two old coke bottles on my bookshelf,

/ sit through Shakespeare mostly

for the scenes

where / am Caliban and love myself.

PETER LEVI.

5

You can try to improve the breed of
monkeys or degrade the Ancient Gods, with
various degrees of success and for various
motives. The effect on yourself is another
thing again, however.

PINK

PLASTIC GODS

by Brian Aldiss

Every day that hot August of 2111 I was in Long
Barrow Field, getting on with the potato harvesting. The
six neosimians I employed worked hard in their monkey
way, the heat shimmering above their bent backs. They
worked two hours on and a half hour off, scamping if I
let them.

“Keep up with us, Judy! Hey, Tess, that’s Daisy’s
trench ! ”

Judy was the laziest of the bunch, yet Judy was the one
I liked best.

Our first shift began as Sol rose, and the last shift
finished after he’d gone and we were up to our knees in
a mist as thick as rice pudding. Slowly we worked our
way roimd the long pillow shape of Barrow Hill, day in,
day out, from pearly light to purple. Neosimians have
their drawbacks — they’re slow for one thing — but they
are vastly cheaper than machines; and unlike machines
they never miss a potato — if you keep watching them.

I kept watching them. Every potato meant a penny off
the load of debt I had shouldered since manhood. But

6

Science Fantasy

that still left me time to glance up to the top of Barrow
Hill every so often, to regard the solitary figure up there
surveying me.

His name was Aurel Derek Seyfert. This story is more
about him than me; my life has none of the highlights
that marked his career.

Seyfen was my nearest neighbour. His home was three
miles over fields and barrens from mine — his a castle,
mine a cottage. We knew nothing of each other; we had
never exchanged a word. Our ways were totally different.
From my bunk I could spit out through the window into
the pigsty; Seyfert had been educated never to part with
his saliva.

The only link between us was the intensity of his regard.
He was mounted and his moimt never moved. Only the
equestrian statue’s eyes moved as he stared out across
the countryside.

Something in his attitude, something in his isolation,
worked powerfully on my mind. A lonely hitman figure
is always a symbol, and I’m a great one for symbols. My
past — or rather my father’s past — has isolated me; in-
stinctively I felt the same was true of Seyfert. Maybe it was
a curious idea for a fellow like me to nourish. In my way
of life you can’t afford too much fancy; probably the heat
made me light-headed.

Seyfert sat up on the bare hill’s brow on a hondlepegg,
which is the Uffitsian version of a horse. Although herds
of them were brought over from that planet to Earth, they
could not be induced to breed here and you never see one
now, outside zoos. Guess they just preferred Uffitsi. Some
animals can choose to die rather than live in a way they
don’t wish to; humans are rarely granted such a faculty.

Seyfert sat on his hondlepegg wearing a black cloak
and a wide hat. Against the sky he was a sinister figure.
Or I suppose he was. For me he was all melancholy. He
had a heavy, dark face, thick cheeks and lips, thick eye-
brows, yet not coarse. From what I could see of his ex-
pression it haunted me; it seemed full of regret; or per-
haps that was simply because I regarded him as a symbol
of regret.

Sometimes he would look down at me and my gang

Pink Plastic Gods

7

of monkey coolies, and I’d imagine what poor scum we
must seem to someone who slept up in a palace. Other
times, he’d scan a horizon we could not see, and then
I’d observe the severe sadness in his eyes.

Though not a word passed between us, though we
never got closer than fifty yards, I knew that Aurel Derek
Seyfert was what I was: an embittered old man, for all
that he slept in silk while I slept on sacks.

Often he’d sit up on his hill for hours at a stretch. Other
times, we would see him for little of a day. He would
appear only for a few minutes before spurring the hondle-
pegg and making off at a canter. No, I felt no idle cur-
iosity about all the rest of his life, his past, his present,
his future if he had any. I was more concerned with my
spuds. He could remain a living symbol for ever, for all
I cared.

Then came the evening he spoke to me.

The autovan had gone off ahead with my little labour
force, Judy and the others riding tiredly back to sleep.
I followed slowly on foot. It was late, night really, with
sunset still rimming all round the sky like a dirty mark
round a bath, and a fat moon low in the south. I was tired
and thirsty and surly — as always I suppose; mine’s not
been the sort of life to encourage gaiety, though I’m not
complaining, mind.

Anyhow, there Se3ffert stood by the start of the track
to my cottage, waiting for me, with the hondlepegg stand-
ing tranquil beside him.

“ You’re on my land, mister,” I said.

“ I wanted to speak to you, neighbour,” he replied. He
took off his wide hat to wipe his brow, revealing a crop
of white hair. Until then I had not thought of him as aged;
now I saw he had fifteen years’ start on me. All I said
was, “ Talk some other time. I’m going home to rest.
It’s been a hard day’s going, as you must have seen from
UD on your perch.”

“ I’ll walk with you if I may.”

“ No you mayn’t.”

He stood with a hand holding the bridle of his mount
and so I left him. I was not meaning to be harsh. It was
just I was tired and thirsty.

8

Science Fantasy

Once I’d got back to the cottage and showered and
drank a pint of water and walked round stark naked
to give the neosimians their nuts and fruit, I began to
wish I had passed the time with Seyfert for five minutes.
After Judy and Daisy and the girls had had their evening
play and been bedded down in their bunks, I flung on a
pair of overalls and a shirt and went back up the track.
He was still there, and that annoyed me. How can time
mean so little to a man?

“ No,” he said.

Nobody would call me a subtle man, but the way he
said that 'no’ gave me a clear insight right into his life. He
was not justifying nor defending a thing; just laying it
down as it came, and you took your pick. That’s my way
too.

I stuck our my hand.

“ Name’s James Smith in case you didn’t know.”

“ No, I didn’t know. Mine’s Aurel Seyfert.”

“ Yeh, I know. You live up in the palace. Glad to know
you.”

“ Glad to know you. Come up to my place for some
food.”

“ Why? ”

“ There’s a party there tonight.”

I laughed. TTie sound surprised me.

“ You give parties and you want me to join in? ” I
asked. “ What is all this? ”

“ All I said was there is a party there. Somehow I
thought I wanted you to see it. It might interest you —
make a change for you, anyhow.”

“ It would do that all right. But you mean you want
me to look in at your party? ” I scratched my head, some-
what hamming up my allotted simple rustic role in life.

“ Man, you heard my words. Smith.”

“ All right. I’ll come if you want me then — Seyfert.”

We rode the three miles to his place, I behind him
mounted on the hondlepegg. They are fragile creatures,
like most creatures from Uffitsi, but it bore us true and
steady.

The outline of this castle of Seyfert’s fitted with how
I thought of him. It was plain and straightforward and

Pink Plastic Gods

9

severe : another symbol. It turned out that I was mistaken
about the insides of both of them. We rode up the wide
drive where several copters were parked, and directly
we reached the entrance I had my first surprise.

We were greeted on the steps by a naked and armless
woman. She was beautiful, with a deep navel and high
breasts, and nothing but a drape low over her hips.

She bowed and welcomed us, and we passed in.

Several people were standing around in the hall —
properly dressed, let me say — hut Seyfert led through
them and up an escalator to a second floor room packed
with guests. They were dressed, too, although none had
on anything so simple as my shirt and overall. None of
them were my kind — or Se^ert’s either; I knew that at
a glance. Their conversation too meant nothing to me:
dull stuff about art or something that they specialised in.
Not that I listened very hard, because I was thinking
“ This must have been my father’s sort of world.” I re-
called how in my childhood bedtime had excluded me
from just this kind of function.

A naked man came across to us, very pink but superbly
built, the perfect physique and a wise face. Most of the
other males in the room looked shoddy beside him. He
carried a tray full of glasses.

“ You’re too well-built to be a waiter,” I told him.

“ Waiting is my pleasure, sir,” he told me.

Seyfert laughed.

“ It’s a robot. Smith, like the armless woman on the
door. Don’t look so surprised ! You’re out of touch. These
things are my son’s invention, my eldest son, Monday;
his factories manufacture the damn things by the hundred.
You must meet Monday. He should be somewhere in this
infernal mob. First let’s have a drink.”

I looked in amazement at the heroic waiter. It made
me sick to think that there were metal parts under that
frame.

“ Are you really a robot? ” I asked. The question
sounded indecent.

“ I am a robot, sir. What would you care to drink? ”

His tray of drinks was a heavy treble-decker, laden
with a variety of liquors.

10

Science Fantasy

“ Water’s all I take,” I said.

Seyfert picked a long glass containing an amber liquid
from the tray.

“ This is an Uffitsian drink, made from grain grown
and distilled on UflBtsi. Please try it.”

Ordinarily I’d have knocked it out of his hand; when
a man says he wants water, why shouldn’t he have water?
Instead, I did take a sip, thank God, just to please the
old man. It was nectar, lovely as the skies, better than
spring water.

“ One’s enough,” I said.

We hung around then. Se57fert looked on; it seemed
like a major occupation with him. He was apparently
neither bored nor interested, but I began to fidget. Fin-
ally Seyfert took the hint.

I was taken to meet Monday. Then I was taken to
meet Tuesday, the second son. Wednesday was a daugh-
ter, pale and languid, totally unlike Seyfert. Thursday
was a son, the youngest, but he was not at the party.

Monday and Tuesday were alike, although Monday
was a bachelor and Tuesday was married and had his
wife with him. These two sons were plump and ageing
men with bald heads and genial moist eyes. Predatory
they looked, perhaps because they smiled too often. Monday
blinked a lot, Tuesday twitched his fingers. Tuesday’s
wife was bony; her face was lemon-coloured. All the time
I looked at them, Seyfert looked at me. We laboured
through some conversation before they broke free.

Then Seyfert led me away, taking another drink from
a tray as he went. By now he had had several, though
their effeas were not noticeable. For myself, I wanted to
get back to the neosimians; you can make sense out of
them.

“ You weren’t a social success with my sons, James
Smith,” he said cheerfully. “ Even their glib tongues
were strained to get you in. They must be thinking what
an odd fish you are.”

“ You’re no better, Seyfert. Notice how everyone
moves away or turns their backs when they see you
coming? ”

“ Sure, sure. Great feeling of power it gives me . . .”

Pink Plastic Gods

11

That party stuck in my gut. Only Aurel Seyfert and I
were old, or rather not pretending to be young. Only we
did not set out to impress. Only we were not soft. And
the softies were tended always by the beautiful pink
robots, each one — I counted a dozen — as fine as the last.
They scurried round tirelessly with the drinks, beautiful
robots, pink and perfect.

“ Now you must meet my wife,” said Seyfert. “ If we
can find her. That will make a grand climax to your
visit.”

“ What did you ask me here for? ”

“ I must have needed a kindred spirit. You’re standing
there looking like the crack of doom. Have another drink.”

The party was livening up. The nonentities were pair-
ing off and dancing to some crappy music. Seyfert’s
white hair floated wildly round his head. Though I hated
the whole occasion. I’ll not say I did not enjoy hating it.

Mrs. Seyfert — Gristobel Bella Idris Seyfert — was
surrounded by grey young men telling her blue jokes. Her
laughter was punctuated by long ‘ ooooohs,’ and she
touched the young men’s chests as she laughed. From
her her sons had got their plumpness; yet she still had some
to spare. As we went up to her, she raked us with a long
wounding glare.

“ Are you both having a lovely time? ” she tinkled
loudly. Then coming too close to me she said in a low
voice, “ I don’t know who you are, dear, but yom common
sense must tell you that my husband was crazy to bring
you up here. I’m sure you are feeling terribly out of place.
Please leave at once before there is any unpleasantness.”

Seyfert heard this and was grinning as he led me away
again. He shook his head without speaking, in the way
one savours success.

“ I’ve had a belly-full of this idle charade — and besides
I’ve got to get up early in the morning,” I told him. “ It’s
time I went home. I’ve seen how you live, if that was what
you wanted, and you may as well know I don’t like it.
Everything here is — false.”

“ Come in here before you go,” he said, not perturbed
by my remark.

We entered what was evidently his study. It was the

12

Science Fantasy

simplest part of the castle I had seen. Jells of Uffitsian
landscapes glowed on the walls, giving life to what was
otherwise an austere room.

Another of the pink statues stood in a comer. It moved
forward and offered us drinks. Against my better judg-
ment I took one, selecting the kind that I had drunk
before. This statue was of a beautiful woman, blunt of
countenance but queenly in her poise, so that my loins
ached unexpectedly as she moved. A sudden pain of
desire spread through my limbs; I stepped forward and
touched the creature. Her flesh had a slight yielding
quality; for all that it was cold and unalive.

I turned to Seyfert. Catching him looking at me in that
same enigmatic way, I said angrily. “Why do you keep
all these statues around? ”

“You mean our pink plastic gods! ” he exclaimed.
Suddenly he became animated. “ They’re at once our
slaves and our rulers! How do you like them, eh? Aren’t
they foul, aren’t they vulgar? Aren’t they the epitome of
our stinking, decadent, useless, putrid civilization? Come
on. Smith, I value your opinion as the first honest man
I’ve met in years. Aren’t they just the goddammed end
of everything? ”

“ They’re beautiful,” I said.

“ Beautiful ! They’re cheap and nasty ! They’re fakes.
Famous sculptures brought to life. That was the Venus
de Milo to greet us at the door. Michelangelo’s David
gave us our first drinks. This little beauty is one of
Canova’s marbles. The castle crawls with walking statues.
‘ Any masterpiece copied for your delight ’ is Monday’s
motto. I told you he manufactures them? Pink plastic
outside, wheels and levers inside. The new household
gods . . . know how many he sold last year alone? Over
two million, at foiu: megabucks a time. Even exports them
to Uffitsi ... I tell you the end’s upon us.”

This talk made me impatient. Seyfert had changed,
his talk even growing more complex than it had been. He
was speaking of the effete part of the world I shunned,
had no dealings with. I guessed he was a bit drunk.
Perhaps I was too.

“ I said they’re beautiful. They are beautiful to me.

Pink Plastic Gods

13

You think they’re ugly, don’t you? Well that’s your opin-
ion, but don’t stuff it down my throat. There doesn’t have
to be just one opinion about everything all the time, does
there? ”

“ Have another drink, man, and keep quiet.”

“ I’m asking you a question, Seyfert. If you don’t like
these what you call pink plastic gods, why not throw ’em
out? This is your place, isn’t it? ”

Seyfert sat in a chair, resting his face in his hands,
obviously pmsuing a line of thought of his own. The
Canova lady had retired to her comer, from which she
stared out at us without sight. At last Seyfert sat up and
spoke.

“ You call a thing a god because it has a power of its
own — like these household gods on which we depend.
We’ve all got gods in our mind, that we built and that
now rule us. And money — there’s a god ! It rules most of
our lives, rules us even when we have a pile of it, the
way Cristobel and I have. No, you don’t throw a god
out ... to try to is just to confirm its rule.”

For a time, I listened with a sort of interest in his per-
formance, because I believed that I understood Seyfert
now. His remark about money struck me as true. But
when he began to ramble, I lost interest and thought it
was time to be getting home. I made a move. He broke
off his soliloquy to stare up sharply at me.

“ What sort of a man d’you find me. Smith? ”

“ You’re deaf to all but your own eccentric music.”

“ ‘Deaf to all but my own eccentric music ! ’ That’s not
a countryman’s phrase. Countrymen ought to stick to the
country — Earthmen ought to stick to Earth. Rich people
ought to stick to rich people. Uffitsian women ought to
stick to Uffitsian men. And I ought to keep my own
company! ”

He sat up suddenly, looking at me and rubbing his
face.

“ I’ve been talking wildly, but there’s excuse for it if
you knew what my life’s been,” he said. “ I had a blow
in my young life from which I’ve never been able to
recover.”

“ You spend too long brooding over your life, sitting

14 Science Fantasy

up there on Barrow Hill as you do. Do some work, forget
yourself, that’s my advice.”

“ That’s why you slave so hard? ”

I looked at him in surprise, not expecting such a shrewd
remark from him. I nodded my head.

“Tell me the story of your life. Smith. Tell me why
you aren’t the simple countryman you look.”

Normally I’d have said nothing. Perhaps the two drinks
loosened my tongue, because suddenly I wanted to tell
the brief and shaming story to him. I said, “ That’s easily
done. Over half a century ago, before I was born, UfEtsi
and Earth found each other. First meeting of interstellar
civilizations, wasn’t it? I was delivered while the first
excitement was on and the flags were still waving in the
back streets.

“ You know man’s natural talents — out of this so-called
Greatest Event in History, all sorts of crooked deals were
hatched. Everyone wanted to get rich out of it in any
way they could, and with Uffitsi being undeveloped, a host
of fraudulent real estate dealers prospered. Remember the
Hardacre Earth Transpace Stock Company? No reason
why you should remember it.”

“ I do remember it,” Seyfert said.

“ My father was involved in that. It sold parcels of
land on Uffitsi it had no right to sell. This was in the
days before we realised the Uffitsians were our equals in
most things and our superiors in many. Hundreds of thou-
sands of people lost their savings in the Hardacre Com-
pany. When it went bust, so did my father.

“ He lost every penny he had one day and shot himself
the next. The shock killed my mother. I was their only
child, a talentless boy of twelve. I hired myself out as an
agricultural labourer and I’ve worked on the land ever
since. That’s all my history, Seyfert, and a damned bleak
one it is.”

It was a long spech for me. When I had finished, I
more than ever wanted to get home. Certainly I had no
wish to hear his life story, which I could feel was brewing
up in him.

“ Funny things happen in a man’s life,” Seyfert re-
marked sombrely.

Pink Plastic Gods

IS

“ I’ve heard that remark before. I’m going home to
bed.” To hell with his platitudes. It occurred to me he
had probably not heard a word I had said.

“ Don’t leave me yet, Smith. This party will . go on
for hours still.”

“ Goodnight, ma’am,” I said to the pink plastic goddess
in passing.

Seyfert caught up with me as I descended the escala-
tor, running after me with an empty glass clutched in one
hand.

“ I’ll ride you home.”

“ Thanks. I can walk three miles. It’s no hardship for
me*

“ I’ll ride with you then — it’ll be a pleasure to get
away. Just let me get a coat ...”

So I had his life story on the way home. It was a velvet
sort of night, with the moon like a millstone rolling just
above the hedges, and I could have enjoyed it better
without words.

He started right from his childhood, how his father
had made money investing in the ScuUpepper FTL Drive,
and who his mother was. With the gentle noises the
hondlepegg made, the rattle of its bridle, the pad of its
hooves, I failed to catch a lot of this. Maybe I was not
listening too closely. I was watching some bats wheeling
and dipping over our path.

“ Then when I was just a very young shaver, I decided
to follow in my father’s footsteps and make money,”
Seyfert continued. “ I invested a small legacy in the Hard-
acre Earth Transpace Stock Company.”

I groaned. At once I believed I knew where his history
was leading.

“ When would this be, about? ” I enquired.

“ About the year twenty-sixty. I’d say. I know I bought
that stock before I bought my first razor. I marched right
into the Hardacre Company’s main offices with the cash
in notes in my hand. And the funny thing was, I even
spoke to Joseph Hardacre himself. I can see him clearly
to this day — rather your long shape of face, but sprout-
ing a big moustache.

“ He must have taken a liking to me. Perhaps a young

16

Science Fantasy

sucker’s more fun than an old sucker. And I took to him,
the old fraud. He invited me into his office and gave me
a drink, and we sat jawing for quite a time after I parted
up with my money.”

There’s a limit to all things. I could no longer bear
that old voice creaking on the violet air. Grabbing the
bridle of his mount, I stopped it dead.

“ Listen here, Aurel Seyfert,” I said, “ since you’ve
pressed me so far, time has come to set you straight
on things I’d rather have left buried. I didn’t tell you
before but I’d better tell you now that this Joseph Hard-
acre you’re talking about was my father. Smith’s not my
name any more than it’s yours. I’m Joseph Hardacre’s son,
blast my luck. I’ve spent all my life getting clear away
from people like you who want to tell me how my father
ruined them when the stock bubble burst. As you’ve made
another pile since, I can’t see I need listen to your com-
plaints on that score.”

And with that I moved on fast. In fact I jog-trotted,
eager to get back to those humble little neosimians who
were like daughters to me. Never mind how bad I felt.
My father’s schemes had put a curse on me; his financial
jugglings had upset my life right from childhood; and
whenever I had peace of mind it seemed they would
rise up again to destroy that peace.

“Hardacre! ” Seyfert called urgently. Not for a long
time had I answered to that name, and I wasn’t going to
start again now. I ran on.

Understand I was confused in my mind. Does it matter
to anyone what I thought or felt in that moment, since
it is all past now? But the truth was I was not only moved
by the old disgust at my father’s reckless dishonesty. I
was also angry at Seyfert for destroying my previous
image of him. His silent and brooding silhouette upon the
bare hill had meant something to me. It had been — oh,
maybe the words are too big to be true — a personification
of all my personal regrets. He had been a symbol up there,
probably a guilt symbol; I told you I lived by symbols.
To find that the real thing was just an old man worrying
about some money he had lost went down badly. I had
hoped his woes were something much bigger, something

Pink Plastic Gods

17

heroic. Tragedy should never have a cash value.

With my thoughts racing so fast, I never heard him
ride up beside me.

“ You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, James,” he
said.

James! I said nothing, just kept forging ahead. I’m not
a man for argument.

“ You didn’t hear the rest of what I had to say,” he
called.

“ Go back to your pink plastic gods, you old fool, and
leave me be.”

He spurred the hondlepegg, wheeling it round in front
of me so that I had to stop. Slipping from his saddle,
he seized me by the overalls.

“ You’re a stubborn man, James. Hold hard for once
and listen to what I’ve got to say. Yours aren’t the
only troubles in the world.”

I should have knocked him down had I been a few
years younger. Instead I just stood there. Maybe it was
the novelty of someone really wanting to talk to me.

“ Your father may have cost me cash, but he made my
life, James. I owe Joseph Hardacre more than I can tell.
You see, when people found out that there was no land
for sale on Uffitsi and his whole scheme went bust, I went
out to UfiBtsi on a Scullpepper ship to see if I could save
anything out of the ruins. Ah, I’d be about eighteen. It
was the adventure of my life, my real day of days, when
we hit Uffitsi.

“ My worthless scraps of contract named four square
miles of territory near the Yovaquoy River in Southern
Region. I went there just to have a look, and met Pampas.
It was under one their big fruit trees — I forget their
name — and Pampas was there picking fallen fruit with a
basket on her hip.

“ There’s a sort of legend growing round Earth nowa-
days that Uffitsi is ugly and its women are unattractive.
The rumour’s been fostered, I guess, by the Spatial Anti-
Miscegenation Laws of twenty-seventy, forbidding Terres-
tials and Uffitsians to marry in case they beget freaks. But
I found the place beautiful, and Pampas even more beau-
tiful. I fell in love with her right there imder that fruit

18

Science Fantasy

tree, and she fell in love with me.”

Now he could see he had no need to hold me, Seyfert
walked along by my side, with the Uffitsian beast follow-
ing on behind. The bats had gone now, and the wayside
grass was loaded with dew. His white hair gleamed in the
twilight. I kept thinking it was somehow childish for men
like us to be talking about love.

“I suppose you know what Uffitsians look like,” he
continued. “ They’re much like us, only tall. Pampas was
a good head taller than me, very thin and spindley, but
graceful. So graceful. Her hair changed colour with the
Uffitsian seasons. In the winter it was a wonderful greyish
green, quite indescribable. You see I tell you all this, but
you only get the words, not the atmosphere. She was just
so wonderful and strange and sweet I couldn’t take my
eyes or lips off her . . .

“ Anyhow . . . We went through a kind of Uffitsian
marriage ceremony with the approval of her clan. I’d
decided never to come back to Earth, and all father’s
dough was not going to tempt me back. Now you must
understand James, Pampas and I were pioneers in what
you might call interplanetary love-making. When she
found that she had conceived and was due for a baby,
neither of us knew what it’d be like. Yet such was the
way we felt that we had no fears about it.

“ She carried it in her slender body for near two years,
the way Uffitsian women do, and often she was sick. But
when the little thing was bom it was a son as right as
rain, and both of us were full of happiness.

“ We called the boy Adam. As we worked in the valley,
so he grew, spindley and gentle, shy and fey, and sweet
as sunshine. He was different from both of us, odd and
elusive, yet full of affeaion — and full of fun. Ah, James,
my god, but those were happy, happy years, the very best
that life could bring ...”

He paused, a catch in his voice. Barrow Hill was rising
ahead of us, dark now the moon was nearly set. Miles
away, an FTL ship left its sparky blue trail in the
heavens, and at the same moment an early cock crowed.
The men who work the new space lanes have forgotten
how the old life of Earth goes on. Some of these pansy

Pink Plastic Gods

19

space pilots ought to come down and work the Earth a
bit, the way I have to.

“ Carry on with your story, Aurel,” I said.

“We were the contentedest trio on Uffitsi or Earth;
Pampas, Adam, and I. Even when at the age of three
Adam still couldn’t say one word, we didn’t worry. We
understood all the little things he ever wanted. Hell,
Pampas and I didn’t talk much either. We didn’t need to,
and I’ve never been the talking kind — except tonight with
too much wine in my old veins. It’s all such a long time
ago. You forget, you know, even when you think you are
remembering. I’m just an old bore nowadays, no good to
anyone.”

“ I’m listening, aren’t I? Get on with your story.”

“ Yes. Well, as I say, we were happy. But all bright
dear things come to an end, and so we came to the year
twenty-seventy. There had been ten years’ communica-
tion ^tween the two planets by then, and the politicians
and scientists on either side were getting the reins between
their hands. Funny thing, by my reckoning they always
do more harm than all your swindlers and individualists
put together. Maybe because they have more power.

“ However that may be, in twenty-seventy the Anti-
Miscegenation Laws were passed with cheers from all the
do-go^ers in the universe. The net result was the estab-
lishing of strict segregation from which it’ll take Uffitsi
ages to recover. If you can picture a cross between the
colour bar in the United States and the apartheid that
ruled what was the South African Republic last century,
you have an idea of what happened on that beautiful
planet almost overnight.

“ So I found myself outside the law, with my marriage
declared null and void, and Adam officially proclaimed a
Sport. According to biologists it was amazing we’d had a
living child at all. Yes, they caught up with us, the
bastards. We could have gone on living peacefully in that
valley for ever. Pampas and Adam and I, but the officials
came with their cases full of forms and police support.
Hardacre, I could have killed every mother’s son of ffiem
— yet they were nice polite men, personally very sorry
for interfering, but orders were orders and the law was

20 Science Fantasy

the law ... You know the attitude. No law is so legal as
a new law, and we couldn’t escape it.

“ We were all three hauled up for trial in a city a
thousand miles away from our valley. We did the jour-
ney on the Uffitsian monorail, under government escort.
On the way — it must have been just the sorrow of it all —
poor little Adam died. He did it so easily, James, so
easily, like falling into an after dinner doze, and never a
word he spoke.”

I did not know what to say. Dying has always seemed
to me the hardest job a man can put his hand to. Of
course, for all Seyfert said, his kid was a freak, no denying
it. We walked in silence for some way while I mulled the
matter over, until Seyfert wiped a hand across his eyes
and spoke again.

“ Anyhow, the long and the short of it was. Pampas
and I were found guilty of miscegenation. My father — a
powerful man by now — pulled strings and got me back to
Earth. I’ve never seen Pampas since, don’t know if she’s
alive or dead. Probably she’s dead by now, and maybe
better off that way.”

“ It’s a hard story, Aurel,” I said. Now I knew where
his melancholy looks came from : my symbol of guilt had
his own guilts to nurse. With difficulty I found something
sympathetic to say. “ I hope your marriage to Cristobel
made up to you in some ways.”

He laughed harshly.

“ I was forced into that. My father wanted it. It was
the debt I owed him and Mother for saving me from an
Uffitsian prison sentence. Now I’ve got three sons and
a daughter, all normal terrestrial offspring. I’ve watched
them all grow up and away from me, growing strong and
rich and far too clever. They mean nothing . . . Well,
you saw them.”

Now we were going down the track to my cottage, all
the world hushed round us, the shapes of hedges black
about our ears.

I knew how he felt now. While his family turned to
what they thought of as the future, and worshipped their
pretty moving statues, he huddled up inside himself re-
gretting the good life he had once tasted.

Pink Plastic Gods

21

“ Little Adam’s never grown away from me,” Anrel
said. “ In my mind, his laughter and tears are as fresh
as they ever were. I see him every day, safe from the fools
that surround me.”

He had arrived at my little place. The pigs snorted as
they heard us coming. Suddenly I was eager to see young
Judy and her five fellow-slaves, to see that they were
sleeping safe before I got some sleep myself. Seyfert
sniffed with self-pity beside me; turning, I saw a tear
glint in the starlight.

“ You live in the past too much, Seyfert,” I said, pick-
ing up a lantern and preparing to see how the neosimians
were doing. “ It’s late. You’d better get home or they’ll
be wondering where you are, Cristobel and the rest.”

“ You’re a hard man,” he said, his voice hardening as
he spoke.

That I didn’t answer. But what I thought inside was.
Why should I comfort him? The bastard, he has some-
thing happy to remember.

Unlatching the wooden door, I stepped into the
monkey-hut with its six small bunks.

“ Goodnight, Hardacre,” he called from outside; but I
did not reply for fear of rousing the little sleepers.

BRIAN ALDISS

The poem on page 4 has been specially written for
this number by Fr. Peter Levi, S.J. It is probably the
first time that a new poem by a leading poet has been
printed in an s-f magazine. We hope that you will enjoy
it and ask for more. Editor.

22

Even when war between men was just some-
thing hateful in history-hooks, war still had
to be waged — against the Brutes. And as
always, the man who would cheerfully
throw away his life was the man who could
not be spared. Like Barrington, who backed
his cunning against —

CONTRAPTION

by Kenneth Bulmer

They all saw him die without a sound. On the closed-
circuit screen, the silent flare of the explosion, utterly
sudden, utterly deadly, momentarily blinded the watch-
ing men in the bunker.

Bill Barrington was not the first man to gamble his
life against the thing out there. He was, in fact, the fifth.
Like all the others, he had lost. Luke Rawson fought
down the sick, helpless anger in him, the useless nerve-
corroding rage. Bill Barrington had been a friend. Now
he was only a memory. They wouldn’t find enough of
him decently to bury in a matchbox.

Inside the bunker, cigarette smoke hung in thick coils
in the air. Noises stung supersensitve ears. Sweat
nmnelled all their faces and chests — everyone was
stripped down to singlets and shorts. But the over riding
sensory impression was the stink of fear: the foetid
unacknowledged aroma of rank, soul-destroying fear.

Twenty men cramped into the observation bunker in a
space designed for twelve — Admiral Simmons had insis-

The Contraption

23

ted on being present at this one. The designers had filled
every wall, the ceiling and the floor with machinery and
screens and control panels. Even the back of the door was
densely covered with fuse boxes.

“ Another brave man,” Simmons said. “ Another.”
The iron in his voice had been tempered by time and
disillusion. “ Waste. Utter waste.”

He did not finish what he had been going to say but
rose, picked up his black jacket, stiff with braid, from the
back of his chair and shouldered out, big and tough and
completely ruthless. Rawson knew that the admiral would
mourn the passing of Bill Barrington for so long as it
took him to walk out of the bunker and across to his
command flier. The Martian desert all about them was
not so pitiless or single-minded as Admiral Simmons.

The others rose deferentially as the Admiral left,
followed by his aides. Of the visitors, only Rawson was
left. He stopped for a moment to talk to Captain Brown,
in charge of the abortive operation.

“ A damn rotten show,” said Captain Brown. He was
thin with deeply cut grey lines parallelling his nose, his
mouth thinned and bloodless. The disillusion in him had
been absorbed from the atmosphere enveloping them all.

“ Bill Barrington was a good man,” Rawson said. “ As
good as they come.”

“ But not good enough,” said Brown. “ Not good
enough for this job — as he so conclusively proved.”

Distaste moved in Rawson. “ He’s the fifth. Is anyone
good enough? ”

Captain Brown gestured tiredly; but his voice was
frosty. “ Yes. Don’t forget, captain, we are men. And no
damn alien is going to beat an Earthman — ”

Going out, leaving Brown still orating, Rawson felt
a flicker of doubt. Man always had been good enough so
far to meet and beat anyone or anything he’d encoun-
tered in space. Even the sick disillusion in Brown
couldn’t drown out the supporting knowledge that Earth-
men always won through.

Going after the others to the admiral’s command flier
and the inevitable cpnference, Rawson wondered. Earth
was fighting an unwanted interstellar war against aliens

24

Science Fantasy

from Bruzzi IX — Brutes, the men of Earth called the
aliens. It wasn’t clever or even very original — but it
adequately summed up men’s feelings about the grey-
skinned, lowering, powerful brutes of aliens who refused
every overture of friendship and fought like maniacs on
sight. So far the struggle for survival had revolved aroimd
warship speeds and striking powers. There were gaping
areas of space between the stars of the two rival combines
that had to be kept free of enemy interference, no less
for the Brutes than for the Terrans. So far no planets
had been invaded. So far only a handful of planets on
the rims had felt the hot breath of war. So far men and
Brutes were not hurting each other in their own back-
yards. So far . . .

Luke Rawson knew — along with every other thinking
man — that the time was approaching when the people of
the Terran grouping woidd reel back under shattering
blows from space. Rawson only hoped that the Brutes
would reel, too, from attacks from Earth.

And now — now the aliens from Bruzzi had turned
clever. They had introduced something fresh and deadly
into the chess-game of murder between the stars, and
until that secret was deciphered then men must die.

As Bill Barrington had died.

Rawson broke into a tired lope over the last ten yards
to catch the command flier’s ladder and haul himself up
into the passenger cabin. He flopped into a seat and sat,
not seeing the other high experts about him, sunk in his
own moody thoughts. On top of his own worries he was
being badgered by this fellow Holtby. Lord knew what
the man wanted. So far he’d been held at bay by LeRoy,
Rawson’s second. But LeRoy had said that Holtby was
so insistent that they’d all get some rest if Rawson con-
sented to see him.

Luke Rawson let his head flop back against the neck-
support and he slept, fitfully and uneasily, on the short
hop into Templetown, the local Headquarters, Temple-
town was uninspiring, a huddle of domes projecting from
the sand, with laimching-bays and fields to one side.
Beneath the ages-old crust of Mars, Templetown exten-
ded in a hundred square miles of tunnel and cavern, a

The Contraption

25

mile deep, filled and humming with hectic activity.
Rawson, half asleep, couldn’t have cared less. He kept
seeing Bill Barrington, vanishing in that soundless ex-
plosion, again and again, as though a film sequence had
jammed in his mind.

If it hadn’t been for what Rawson had brought back
from space. Bill Barrington would still be alive.

The conference — the inevitable conference — got under
way a scant hour after the command flier had scudded
down to her berth. In that hour Rawson had had a shower
and a meal and, one degree fresher, walked along to the
top-secret conference room. This one, like the others,
woiJd be futile, too.

“ Five,” Captain Matsu was saying, thudding a fist
into his palm. “ Five. I’d like to blow the Brutes up with
their own devilish tricks.”

Rawson found a seat at the long mahogany table and
let his tired body sink down. He reached for the carafe
and glass. Commander Pulaski was doodling nothings on
a jotter. He was blue-chinned and squat. He looked up at
Matsu, trim and dapper, with pomade over his ears, and
said : “ We’d all like that, captain. The trick is how to
swing it? ”

Matsu nodded perfunctorily towards Rawson. “ There’s
the genius. He’s brought in three of these beauties. Do
we send him out again for a sixth? ”

Rawson drank water. His hand was perfectly steady.
He did not bother to reply to the oblique question.

Pulaski glowered at his jotter, then ripped out the
page, screwed it up and flung it savagely from him. The
automatic dispenser caught it and tucked it away down
the slot. “ A full-size battle fleet out beyond Endymion
might be more to the point,” he growled.

“ Sound tactics,” nodded Matsu, smoothing his hair.

“Apart from the awkward fact that we don’t have a
spare battle fleet hanging around doing nothing.”

Rear Admiral Cyrus Q. Ombebe turned from his long
scrutiny of the wall charts. His black face caught the
reflected lights in sweat-beads so that, for that moment,
he shone like a pagan idol. He looked as tired as the
others around the table; yet the spring in his walk, the

26 Science Fantasy

fire in his voice were as volatile as they had been when
this hopeless quest had begun.

“ All over here,” he said, tracing a quick finger circle
on the charts. “ All these stars are supposed to be Terran
dominated. The trade-lanes should be safe. Yet — ”

“ Yet we lose merchant ships every week,” Pulaski
said angrily, rising and stamping across to the rear-
admiral. Rank, here in this tension-filled conference room,
was a minor matter. “ And I say it’s because of that
damned gadget Rawson brought back.”

Luke Rawson remained silent. He drank more water.

Captain Matsu was about to say something when the
harsh tramp of feet beyond the door, the slap as the
sentry came to attention, brought them all out of their
chairs. They stood silently as Admiral Simmons and his
aides entered.

Simmons waved a hand and the conference sat.

“ Right, gentlemen. You know why you are here. The
same reasons apply now as applied after the first — after
all four.” He gestured brusquely to an aide, who pressed
buttons.

Rawson closed his eyes. “ Oh, no ! ” he said to himself
in bleak despair. “ I can’t stand it all over again.”

But when the wall screen lit up and they ran through
the film of Barrington’s death, he watched with chilled
attention, absorbed. Every movement made by the
doomed man held a significance. They had to beat this
hoodoo, break down the secret the Brutes had built into
their ships, a secret that everyone knew — felt in their
spacemen’s bones — was responsible for the incredible
number of losses out beyond Endymion.

The camera steadied on the object beneath Barrington’s
fingers. Complex, complicated, convoluted, it sprouted
from the decking of the alien starship — the Brute cruiser
that Rawson had detected, run up on, engaged, beaten and
taken and brought back to Mars. — flowering in intricate
curves and angles of metal, plastic and glass. The colours
flowed over it in ever changing patterns. It vibrated
slightly, a pulse of pseudo-life. Looking at it, remember-
ing riding with the devilish contraption all the way back
to Mars from Endymion, Rawson recalled too the cold

The ContraptioD

27

shudders the thing had sent shivering over him all that
dismal journey. And then, at the end of all that, Bill
Barrington had had to die.

Barrington had been the expert on booby-trapped
bombs, delays, triggers, trips; all the multifarious gadgets
used by the aliens to protect their secret weapons were,
in theory, an open spool to Barrington. But he hadn’t
beaten this one. This one had sneered in his face and
then blown up, taking him along with itself and this
strange and pseudo-alive object.

Rawson had watched that alien artifact all the way
home from Endymion, so he was able to observe coolly
the subtle movements of Barrington’s hands. The comen-
tary came over this time, that previously had been fed
only into the auditory group’s ’phones.

“ . . . standard Mark Twenty-nine trigger here”
came Barrington’s steady, husky voice. No hint of panic
in it. “ There. That’s the trembler gone. Now to with-
draw . . . yes, that’s clear. Lay it down gently, Bill
boy . . . Right. Now what’s this little doohickey? Umm.
Yes, rather an interesting variation on the Mark Fifty
snatch-fuse. You slip your crevice-tool in to stop the con-
tact and the beast snatches back the other way . . .
Very clever. I’ll take this slowly so the cameras have a
full look in.”

Looking at Barrington, knowing what he knew, Rawson
still wanted to jump from his chair and scream a warn-
ing.

Around him in the conference-room the high experts
were breathing irregularly, reliving those few pregnant
minutes. Admiral Simmons sat hunched like a rock,
immobile, his face scoured clean of expression. Rawson’s
eye crawled unwillingly round to the old man, needing
the strength and calm that he was wrapped in. Then
Barrington’s recorded voice changed in timbre, snatching
his eyes back to the screen, snapping every sense back to
the alert.

“ This is as far as Jeffries got, I think” Jeffries had
blown himself up on Number Four. “So we fust take it
a leeetle eeasier from now on . . . The next stage looks
like a modified Mark Twenty-Nine. Humm, Bill, hoy.

28

Science Fantasy

don't touch that yet. Think that one over. Why a Mark
Twenty-Nine when we've just gone through one? These
triggers and trips may not all be set to a single charge.
As to where the charge is, that is yet to be established.
The whole thing isn't a bomb. That we know. It's some
sort of scientific gadget they want to protect. Right. So
they smother it with booby traps. Right again."

On the screen the pictured face of Barrington swam
with sweat. His nostrils pinched in. The hands above that
evil, alien mechanism were quite steady, sure and deft,
the hands of a master surgeon. “ I theenk,” he said softly,
“I theenk we'll go in here. Bill, boy. This one is a new
'un. Yes. Hullo! What's that — oh — God\ "

The rest had been snipped off the film.

“ So,” said Admiral Simmons, turning to face the con-
ference. “ He knew that it was coming to him. He saw
what he’d done wrong.”

A disembodied voice lower down the table said; “He
looked death in the face.”

Simmons chose to ignore that. He switched his stony
glare towards a young lieutenant, sitting sweating and
with his youthful, fresh face pallored over with a sickly
green.

“ Explain what you think the modified Mark Twenty
Nine was,” he barked. “ And also the new things that
Barrington discovered.”

The lieutenant swallowed twice and licked his lips.

“ Take your time, Bikila,” said Rear Admiral Cyrus
Q. Ombebe softly.

Lieutenant BiMa flashed him a grateful glance. Then,
in a surprisingly strong voice, he said: “We list the
Brute booby traps by Mark numbers. Twenty Nine is a
particularly nasty one, able to be fused in any of a dozen
different ways. Til have to see the cuts of the cameras
angled down — that’s routine, sir. As to the new one that
Bill — uh — Barrington saw. From the photographs it’s
quite impossible to judge. I’d have to work direct on a
model.”

Admiral Simmons wasted no time. He swung that
ferocious glare on Rawson. “ Captain Rawson.”

“ Yes, sir,” Rawson said, sitting up. “ I understand.”

The Contraption

29

“ Can you do it again quickly? ”

Rawson fought off the dull anger in him. Could he do
it again quickly? Could he do it again at all was a ques-
tion more to the point. The Brutes had some wonderful
new instrument in their control cabins. With its aid they
were knocking Terran ships out of space beyond Endy-
mion like snipe at shooting time. To protect that instru-
ment in case of capture they had so efficiently booby-
trapped it that five of the best brains of Earth had blown
themselves up. Open and shut. Go out and take another
example — so that Lieutenant Bikila could have his chance
to blow himself up.

Rear Admiral Ombebe coughed and then, quietly, said :
“ Might it not be quicker to have a ship in that area pick
up a Brute — ? ”

Admiral Simmons did not bother to look at Ombebe.
He said : “ I’m afraid you have not had time to familiar-
ise yourself with all phases of this operation, Admiral.
Captain Rawson’s ship has special equipment.”

“ I see.” Ombebe didn’t push it. He had only just
joined the committee and he was fresh from Endymion.
He had been seeing the results of the Brutes’ handiwork
face to face.

Into Rawson’s mind rushed the host of detail that
has ever plagued a ship captain’s waking and sleeping
hours. Oh, yes, he would go out again into the dark
spaces beyond Endymion, the last friendly Terran base
until your ship had made the long haul across to the
Gobi cluster. Apt name, that, Gobi cluster, for those
stars swam in a desert of space and drew their skirts
away from the swarms of stars and planets comprising
the rim of Terran influence. There were scattered stars
lying along the wide sweeping trade routes; but none
possessed planets of any use.

Out there — beyond Endymion, where the merchant
ships fled in frightened clumps, like sheep herded by
their watchful, tongue-lolling dogs. Those tireless dogs
were the ships of the Terran Navy’s escort fleets, and
the Brutes were running them ragged. Out there in the
vasty dark was no place for weaklings, no quiet con-
templation of the stars, out there lay only horror and

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Science Fantasy

destruction and final, merciless death.

He realised that he had not yet answered Simmons’
question. But no answer was necessary. The granite
admiral knew what the answer would — must — be.

Captain Brown, along with the others taking Rawson’s
assent in their stride, began the detail of the enquiry.
Rawson intervened. “Lynx is in need of attention, sir.
May I be excused? I shall have to work — ”

“ Very well, captain. Please. And ” — ^that stony face
did not relent a fraction; but some quality in the words
touched Rawson deeply. “And, Rawson — thank you.”

He made his formal farewells, picked up his black
cap with its double row of braid, acknowledged the
sentry’s salute, and walked slowly out of the building
onto the endless walkway of Templetown.

Coming out onto the underground space workshops,
where the giant gantries lifted and the caverns of machi-
nery hummed everlastingly, he stopped for a moment
to look upwards. A quiet pride, a pride of humility,
filled him as he looked on Lynx. Her lath-lean hull
soared in strange contrast to the stubby, powerful hulls
of battle-ships studding the shops, with the flares of
working parties crawling on their hulls. Lynx was all
speed, all fire-power and all gadgetry. A schoolboy with
a rubber-powered catapult could put a marble though
her “ plating ” at twenty paces. That made for disturbed
dreams.

He took a pickup truck out to her. Lieutenant-
Commander LeRoy met him at the lock.

“ Good to see you back, skipper.”

"We’re off again, as soon as we can, Roy. Cheer up!
This time we’ll do it all in our sleep.”

LeRoy looked uncomfortable. “ Uh, skipper. That last
one — ? ”

Slowly Rawson shook his head.

LeRoy said: “ Did I know him? ”

“ Bill Barrington.”

“ Oh, hell.” LeRoy turned away. “ I’ll push those
grease-monkeys . . . Bill Barrington. Oh sweet stinking
violets.” The phrase was cutting, powerful. Sweet violets
was the final bed of so many good men.

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31

Then, held by a thought that had been worrying him
all day — Martian day, courtesy Greenwich Mean Time
— LeRoy stopped and said : “ Oh, skipper. That chap
Holtby— ”

“What about him? Good grief, Roy! We’ve a job
to do.”

“ I know sir. But — well, he’s insistent. And he has
papers. He wouldn’t show me. Insists on seeing you.”

“ Where is he? ”

“ I parked him in the wardroom with a big gin to
cool off.”

“All right. Send him to my space-cabin and tell him
I can spare five minutes. No more. Check? ”

“ Check, sir.”

In those five minutes Rawson intended to shave, eat
a scratch meal Jekins, the pantryman would bring in,
and decide just what priorities must over-ride all else.

He made a miscalculation there, for a start.

In his space cabin — a metal box, spartan, functional,
he shaved with his right hand and stuffed egg-and-bacon
sandwiches into his contorting mouth with his left. Jekins
said : “ Colonel Holtby, sir.”

Rawson stopped shaving. Through bacon and egg he
said : “ Colonel I Colonel Holtby? ”

“At last, captain, at last.” Holtby was large and
powerful, with the sort of face that could glare right
back after a steamroller had passed over it. He was
wearing civilian clothes and carried a brief case. Rawson
did not miss the slight bulge under his left armpit.

“My second didn’t tell me you were army, colonel.
My apologies.”

“Now I have at last seen you, that doesn’t matter.
I’m coming along with you on this trip, and so my
rank — ”

“You’re coming along! I’m sorry. That’s quite
impos — ”

“ I assure you captain, that it is not. If you will just
glance at these papers ...”

In five seconds Rawson knew he would be taking
Holtby along. “ Terran Intelligence. Well, well. I never
thought I’d actually meet a TI man in the flesh.” He

32

Science Fantasy

almost added sarcastically: “No cloak and dagger,
I see.” But then he remembered the bulge under the
armpit, and remained silent. Holtby would bear
watching.

“ I have this ship to make spaceworthy,” Rawson
pointed out quietly. “ If you’re coming with us, you
can tell me what you need to tell me — and from what
little I know of TI men that won’t be much — when we’re
spacebome.”

“ Good. Thank you, captain. I’ll wait for you
to call me.”

And he was gone with the grace of a stalking panther.

Holtby was a first class man, Rawson decided. Then
he forgot everything else in the concentrated labour
of bringing Lynx back into fighting trim.

Taking that last Brute — the devil that had destroyed
Bill Barrington in her cabin — had cost Lynx a few
square feet of plating, a busted driver and a section
of three turrets knocked out. The casualties had been
buried in space. Those Brute gunners shot exceedingly
straight.

Waiting out in orbit just past Deimos lay Lynx's
armour. Layer after layer of steel plating, forming the
petticoats of armour into which the ship would snuggle
like a pip in an onion, her armour was frighteningly
little, cut right down so that it could withstand a bare
minimum of Brute shooting. Proof of that lay in the
shattered hull of the ship’s fabric itself. Rawson drove
his crew hard, and the dockyard maties responded, so
that in far less time than anyone would have thought
possible. Lynx was ready to space out again. She lifted
jets, picked up her armour and, cocooned in its decep-
tive protection, went onto her Stellengers for the long
haul out to Endymion.

After that and with a twelve-hour stretch of sleep
behind him, Rawson felt human again and able to
listen to Holtby.

The colonel bent his craggy head over the table in
Rawson’s cabin. The flood of light from above gleamed
from his cheekbones, cast a lurid light and shade over
that domineering face. He turned out the briefcase and

The Contraption

33

opened a star chart. Rawson looked at it, waiting.

Holtby placed a large square finger on a star smack
in the wastes between Endymion and Gobi.

“ There, captain, is my target.”

At first Rawson did not understand.

When Holtby had explained further, Rawson said:
“ You want me to take you to that star — if I understand
aright — and drop you in a picket-boat onto a planet
you claim is also there? ”

“ Precisely, captain. You have seen my papers. We’re
all in this war against the Brutes together; yet there are
certain things that cannot be generally revealed.”

“ I know that,” Rawson said frostily. “ But it would
be nice if sometimes the left hand knew what the right
was up to.”

Holtby chuckled. “ I have full authorisation from the
Navy Board — oh, yes, that is so. It was considered that
a quiet little transaction between, the prime parties —
you and me, captain — would fit the equation better than
a cloak-and-dagger arrival of a secret-service man and
his equipment aboard a Terran Navy cruiser. You
follow? ”

A certain fear clutched Rawson then. He had been
hearing rumours, strange stories that he did not want to
believe. Slowly, he said ; “ Do you think the Brutes
can infiltrate Earthmen, colonel? Can they pass as men
and spy on us? ”

Holtby’s craggy face was stark in the lamplight.
“ I don’t know. I don’t believe anyone does. But my
department considered it wise not to advertise my pre-
sence. Now we are in space we — ”

“ We consider any alien an enemy and fire if there
are no recognition signals. Oh, yes. We can fight ’em
in space.”

“And we’ll win.”

“Have a noggin on that.” Rawson filled the glasses.
“ Mist over your grave,” he said, without thinking.

Holtby’s face split into a mighty smile. His eyes
puckered in folds of flesh. “ University of Venus ! ”

“ Right. You, too—? ”

For the next hour they talked old schools and clubs

34

Science Fantasy

without a break. Rawson’s parents, farmers in a middle-
sized way on Venus, had sent their only son to U of V
in the hope he would learn agriculture and return to
run the farm in a super-scientific way. But young Luke
Rawson had had his eyes fixed on the stars beyond the
cloaking mists of Venus, and he had joined the Space
Navy. His parents had accepted that, after a bitter
struggle. Rawson was a man with a single-purpose mind;
until a job was finished he allowed nothing to distract
him. He’d left the farm and the girl and gone into space.
He’d never regretted that decision.

Not until — ^perhaps — now. Now that he was engaged
on a mission that, if he was successful, would bring
death to a young bomb-happy lieutenant back on Mars.

“ Of course,” he said, “ you understand I’ve no
authority to put you down — where was it? ” He checked
the chart. “ On Cudham I. If there is a Cudham I.”

“ There is. The star’s a pretty fierce fellow and the
planet should be far enough out for water to remain
liquid.”

“ Yes,” agreed Rawson. “ That’s the acid test of
habitability.”

“ I shall be going in alone. My pinnace was shipped
aboard along with my gear.”

“ Humph,” said Rawson.

“As to the pick-up — ”

“ I’ve a mission of my own, you know — ”

“ Yes. Tm not aware of the details, of course. But
I was told that you were the fastest ship going out past
Endymion and returning as fast. Just what I wanted.
No other ships suitable and those suitable not available.
It’s always the same in space.”

“ Rawson fingered his glass. “ Science is a pretty
wonderful force. It’s abolished nearly all disease, given
us ample food and power, enabled us to ride comfortably
between the stars. We’re even beginning to have a
glimmering of understanding about the human brain.
By using the powers of scientific thought and processes
in a logical and reasonable way we’ve brought humanity
along in pretty fine shape. But science is only a tool.
Science can be used by others besides men — is being

The Contraption

35

used. We know that. When aliens meet up with us
they’re using scientific methods just as we are. So it
boils down then — ”

“ To a contest between man and alien.”

“Right, a straight fight. And the man with the better
science will win. We trust.”

“ So? ”

“ So I put you down on Cudham I and go off on my
lawful duties. I might not get back, colonel. Science
cannot yet completely control the laws of chance. Lynx
might be destroyed. You’d stay a mighty long time on
that planet — if there is a planet.”

“There is and I might. A risk.” Holtby finished his
drink. As he poured more Rawson knew that the colonel
had thought through his own problems a long time ago.
It made him appreciate the man more.

Lynx bored on through her peculiar space-time con-
tinuum that carried her in seven league boots through
normal space. Rawson did not stop off at Endymion;
he was fully fuelled, provisioned and armed. And he
couldn’t spare the time. The ship carried out exercises
on the run. LeRoy, in particular, having charge of the
tackybeam, was exercised almost off his feet. Three
successes meant only that the odds against you had
shortened.

From Endymion on out towards the distant glow of
the wide-circling arm of the galaxy lay one of those
strange blank areas, where dust had swirled millenia
ago and, writhing clear, had left a stellar desert. On
that route Earth was forced to punch men and supplies
out to the Gobi cluster; for the Brutes lay beyond.
Setting out, picking up, overhauling and leaving behind
convoy after convoy, Rawson realised again how populous
in terms of ships was all this area.

Finding an alien ship in space, with the help of
modern radar, was not quite impossible; the Brutes
managed it neatly enough, time after time.

It was now Rawson’s timi again to find a Brute.

Holtby grew even more contained as Cudham came
up. He waited by the lock on his pinnance, chatting
to a subbie. Rawson clattered along steel ladders, wishing

36

Science Fantasy

to shake hands before Holtby left. Outside, filtered,
swam the gross sun, Cudham. Their detectors had picked
up the planet, and Holtby was on his way in.

“ Best of luck.”

“ Thanks.”

“ We’ll be back here in one week — Earth. Check? ”

“ Check.” The lock sighed shut and the pinnace
leaped from the flank of Lynx, and immediately her
armoured flaps closed up like irises, tight against any
possible attack.

“ Hope he makes it, sir,” ventured the subbie,
McGarth.

“ If anyone can, he will.” Rawson smiled at the
youngster.

Then he set about his own deadly hunting.

On the third day LeRoy straightened up from the
idem machine. “A Brute, sir. Without question.”

“ Good,” Rawson breathed. “ May the Lord help him.”

They vectored up on the alien, their radar bafiles
going at full blast, their Stellengers idling, matching
velocities in this queer other-universe that extended in
some impossibly distorted dimension. Lynx had once
been armed with thirty Mark Two Wodens, each gun
having six barrels and capable of punching out three
hundred rounds a second. Each round was a cubic inch
of fissile lead. To make room for LeRoy’s tackybeam
the dockyard had ripped out twenty of the Wodens,
leaving Lynx with the punch of a kitten.

Rawson knew that. Knew, too, that his petticoats of
armour had been drastically curtailed. He had to slide
up in that wide grey blank of otherspace where some-
times the lurid glow of a supernova broke through from
real space, slide up unobserved, pounce like the Lynx
she was named for and take a Brute without being hurt
too much.

Last time — well, that damage had been light.

As a battleship Lynx was past her prime; as a mobile
fighting tug, she was deadly dangerous — if LcRoy could
t^ow his tackybeam and make contact before Lynx
was shot up. If . . .

“He must spot us by now! ” McGrath was saying.

The Contraption

37

hands nervously clenching on the rail of the control
panel. “He must! ”

“ Oiu: dazzle equipment — ” began Lieutenant French;
but he subsided under the baleful glare of Rawson.
Steadily, Lynx crept up. The Brute was showing clearly
on the forward screen now, a slim, armoured shape that
spelt Heavy Raiding Cruiser all over space. Any moment
now that image would fade, flicker, disappear. That
would mean the alien had spotted them and had turned
her dazzlements on full blast.

At the optics the ratings sat watchful, keeping the
Brute automatically balanced in the dead centre of their
mirrors, watching him in this strange otherspace by the
only rays that, so far, couldn’t easily be b^ed — light.
For, of course, Rawson had weighed up his chances
before this, everything went on in this otherspace at
a steady, sedate speed relative to other objects — that
they were hurdling the parsecs in moments in true
space meant nothing. So he must wait for the precise,
split second —

“ Now I ” His voice was perfectly controlled.

LeRoy swung the tackybeam into action. The Brute
wiped herself off the forward screens, to be replaced
immediately by an optical picture relayed from a tele-
scope. She fired. For what it was worth, Rawson also
give the order to fire and the puny armanent of Wodens,
HMunted in their balls on outriggers, started to chatter,
flinging out three thousand roimds a second.

Now was the moment of supreme danger. In any
rational space-action the ships were in contact for a
fleeting moment only, braking to hurl their thousands of
tiny missiles at each other and then streaking away to
avoid the return fire. Now Rawson had to hold on,
jinking a little in hope of avoiding the Brute’s salvo,
bore in with LeRoy juggling his controls and the tacky-
heam waving about like a baton in the grip of a dnmken
conductor.

“ Got her ! ” LeRoy shouted, sweat pouring off his
face.

In the same moment Lynx ran into a fringe of the
alien’s fire. Lead pellets cracked into her armour, ripped

38

Science Fantasy

it apart, smashed their murderous way through to the
hull. Lieutenant French span away, screaming, his lower
body cut away. Lieutenant-Commander LeRoy glared
stupidly at the place where his left hand had been. Then
he said : “ Got her ! ” And fell crumpled to the decking.

Death had struck at other places aboard Lynx. One
of the Wodens was vapourised away from her outriggerj
an atomic driver was splintered; a group of engineers
clustered around a Stellenger had been crushed to pulp.
But they had the Brute. They had her!

Feeling very tired, Rawson gave the necessary orders
and waited as the lights dimmed, the song of the engines
faltered and everyone’s hair stood on end. Tremendous
energy flamed along the tackybeam, speared into the
alien, killed every living thing aboard in a single
heartbeat.

“ Head for Cudham,” Rawson told the astrogator.
With LeRoy out of action, he would have to see to
cleaning up the ship himself — they were shorthanded
now that French, too, was gone.

Old and outdated she might be, short on armour and
short on Wodens, but Lynx was still a beauty. Rawson
took a little time to return to his usual stern captaincy
from the red ecstasy of fighting in space. No sane man
could envisage a space-battle in a sane frame of mind;
all the spacenavy fighting men were juvenile delinquents,
all a little crazy — that was the only way to stay sane.
He conned the ship back to Cudham, feeling like a man
letting down after a hundred-metre dash.

Holtby was there. “ I see we’ve company,” were
his first words as he stepped from the lock of his
pinnace.

“ Come and have a drink,” said Rawson. Holtby
looked done in. He had a week’s growth of beard, hii
eyes were circled by red and black streaks, concen-
trically, and the look on his face was not good to see

With a very large gin in his hand he said : “ I’m glad
you’ve succeeded in your mission, captain. I’m afraid
I’ve failed in mine. His carved lips all at once softened,
crumpled. “Failed rather badly, in fact.” Suddenly he
hurled his glass to the decking.

The Contraption

39

Rawson sympathetically remained silent as Holtby
got over it. Failure to the big man was a new experience.
Later Rawson said : “ Care to tell me about it? ”

They’d buried Lieutenant French and what they could
find of the other casualties in space, and Rawson felt
like hearing of someone else’s woes, just as a sort of
masochistic counterbalance. He felt as though he’d never
been to sleep in his life.

“ Well, can’t do much damage now. Intelligence
wanted a quiet little looksee at Cudham I. Feller called
Withers had reported a planet; but there was some snag,
he said. His full report never came through: only the
faa that there was a planet there.”

“And if we sent in a full scale Survey the Brutes
might wonder why we were interested in a lone planet
in the middle of nowhere — ? ”

“ Right. It’s of no use to anyone except as a base.
TI asked me to land on the quiet and do a spot of
surveying — army stuff. But I couldn’t get down at all.”
Rawson felt surprise. “ But your pinnace — ”

“ Rocks, old boy. Rocks and stones and chunks of
metal that’d rip out the guts of any ship fool enough
to drop in among ’em.”

“ Like Saturn? ”

“ Like Saturn heU! ”

Circling around Cudham I in an unbroken shell, said
Holtby viciously, were literally billions of rocks. All
sizes and shapes, he said, were there scraping and bump-
ing, parting and closing up again as their horribly
involved orbits clashed. Like a shell aroimd a clam,
that was Holtby’s judgement. No going through — unless
you had a secret passage.

When Holtby fell silent Rawson sat silent in turn.
He screwed the glass around in his broad capable hands,
thinking of Venus, his home planet. Finally he said:
“ But wouldn’t the surface be in darkness, anyway? ”
“ No, I shouldn’t think so. That sun is bright, and
the shell of rocks is by no means a permanently light-
tight barrier. As to what the surface may be like —
well ...”

“But it might serve the Brutes very nicely as

40

Science Fantasy

a base? ”

Holtby looked up and the big savage face creased.
“ Yes. We don’t know. We could just wipe the whole
damn planet out — but we can’t do that until we know
what’s below. We might wipe out a virgin planet— or
one filled with friendly people. We just don’t know.”

“And until we get down — ”

“ We’ll never know.”

A fierce and completely irrational desire gripped
Rawson to go back to Cudham I and to force a passage
through that ship-wrecking shell. The sneaky thought
hit him that Holtby was, after all, only army. It would
take a Space-Navy man to let down through there —
but he dismissed the thought with the contempt it
deserved; Holtby’s pinnace was equipped with first-rate
astrogation equipment and Holtby was a first-class man.
There had to be another answer.

Then Rawson stretched, still feeling the tiredness
pulling down his back, and yawned. It wasn’t his
problem. He had to face the long run back with the
Brute in tow, the tricky business of putting a prize
crew aboard for the let-down onto Mars — ^tugs would
swarm out ready to assist — and then the inevitable con-
ference, the X-raying of the Brute device, the harrow-
ing watching as a man attempted to uncover its booby-
trapped secrets — and, very possibly, another soundless
explosion and another friend shredded into thin pink
flecks.

The sequence of events went off in his mind with
a frightful deliberation that appalled him. He was back
again in that devilish bunker, watching hypnotically
that mocking screen as Lieutenant Bikila worked his
way slowly through the alien booby traps. The same
sweat of fear stank in the bunker. Admiral Simmons sat
with his basalt face glowering at the screen. Everyone
waited and watched and cringed at every move
Bikila made.

If he blows up, Rawson thought deliberately, I’m not
going back for another Brute. They can only shoot me.

Bikila did not blow up.

Rear-Admiral Cyrus Q. Ombebe had been working

The Contraption

41

hard since his appointment to the committee. Mockups
reconstructed from photos and solidos had been made
of the alien device. Bikila felt his way through with
growing confidence.

Rawson’s breath rasped in his throat, and his mouth
was dry from too many cigarettes. Why did he have to
watch this? It wasn’t his department. But he knew he
couldn’t stay away.

Bikila’s sweat-runnelled face swung towards the screen.

“ The last trip,” his voice came over the cut-in audios.
“ The last damn one. She’s safe.”

The booby-trap expert walked out of the alien ship
like a very old man. He deserved the biggest medal
Earth could give him; that Rawson knew. All he’d get,
very probably, was another assignment. Ombebe hustled
things then, his black face shining with enthusiasm, his
eagerness transmitting itself to the experts who went
aboard. Rawson heard the result of their findings when
the inevitable conference opened.

Boiled down, what the experts had to say was — they
could not understand the strange device, with its flushing
colours and eerie pseudo-life. They had been able to
take it to pieces when all the booby-traps had been
removed. They had poked and pried and come up with
an answer that floored the conference.

That answer was : “ We do not believe this device
has any practicable purpose.”

“ Rubbish,” growled Admiral Simmons.

" The Brute cruiser is fully equipped for every depart-
ment of warfare. Nothing is omitted that this device
might exist to fulfill.”

Rear Admiral Ombebe sat hunched forward, staring
at a three-fifths scale model of the thing set up on the
mahogany table. The very convolutions, the complexity,
the exaggerated bizarreness of the thing worried them
all — and it was left to Ombebe to make the obvious
remark.

“We have been losing to many ships out there on
that long run from Endymion. The aliens just slide up
to our ships and knock them off and slide away again,
untouched. They are fast and rangy and well-armoured.

42 Science Fantasy

Captain Rawson — I believe your salvoes had no effect
on this one? ”

“ That is correct, admiral.”

“ If no one has the remotest idea of what this thing
is for — what the hell it does — if all the best technical
and scientific brains of the Space Navy cannot assign
even a potential function to it — in short, if the thing
does not do anything — then why is it aboard? ”

Captain Matsu said carefully : “ We believe the Brutes
have no counterpart to our tackybeam. Oh, I know it’s
a suicide weapon. Captain Rawson had to go right
close to get his beam into action at all. A Woden Mark
Three would have knocked him out of space at three
times the distance. But — ^but might not this thing be
some sort of alien equivalent? Or might it not be a
warning device? ”

Ombebe considered. Then he shook his head. “ It
might be, captain. But I do not think so. The alien
was not warned when Captain Rawson came in close.
Only luck and superb spacemanship riding up the Brute’s
efflux did that for him. I say again that this device
does nothing.”

The fierce, choking, savage anger in Rawson blurred
the room and he had to blink ferociously to see straight.
He thought of the men who had been killed, right
down to Bill Barrington and Frenchy, and of LeRoy’s
comments on his new prosthetic left hand — and all that
had been wasted.

He stood up lurchingly. Every eye swung to him. He
couldn’t see the others clearly, all these high experts;
but he was aware of the basalt face of Admiral Simmons
like the beak of an oldtime ship thrusting through banks
of fog.

“ It’s the oldest trick in the game,” Rawson said
hoarsely. “ Do they think we’re morons on Earth? ”

They were on Mars; but it was a figure of speech.
And everyone knew just what Rawson meant.

“ Sure it’s an old trick,” Ombebe said. “ But it’s
still a good one — ”

“ I cannot agree, admiral,” Captain Matsu said in his
thin, precise voice. “ The Brutes cannot yet judge our

The Contraptioo

43

psychology well enough for this. I remain convinced that
this device is installed aboard alien raiding cruisers
for a specific purpose and function — ”

“ Yes,” Ombebe said, punching the words home. “ For
a specific purpose and function. That of fooling us!
Of making us spend time and money and men — men’s
lives I — on opening it up.” His ebony face was passionate
with his conviction.

“ They must be laughing when they think of us being
blown up trying to find out what a worthless piece of
equipment does ! I bet they had fun designing that
thing! ” Rawson sat down and reached for the carafe
and glass. The laugh was on the men from Earth all
right . . .

Pulaski was thumping the table and Bikila was swear-
ing in a low monotone. Matsu, smoothing back his hair,
was arguing violently with Ombebe. Rawson sat as the
others wrangled — the pride of Earthmen had been stung.
The conference had to face the impalatable fact that
they had been fooled — and they didn’t like it.

“A decoy! A dummy! ” Admiral Simmons’ words
froze the babble of sound. Everyone looked at the old
admiral waiting.

Then — for the first time in the memory of anyone
present — Admiral Simmons smiled.

Seeing that smile, Rawson suddenly felt very sorry
for the man — or thing — who got in Simmons’ way.

“ The aliens from Bruzzi,” said Admiral Simmons in
his grating voice, " have been clever and almost success-
ful. They have tied up this committee, they have wasted
a considerable amount of effort on our part, they have
misdirected other effort, and they have killed expensively-
trained Earthmen. The installation of this device, which
I am sure they can turn out in their spare time — as we
would, a joke to be played on the enemy which we
think up in off-duty hours — has cost them little. They
have lost the cruisers we have captured; but we would
have fought without our hands being tied by a tacky-
beam otherwise — ” He glanced at Rawson.

Rawson understood the use of ‘ we.’ The navy were
in this thing solidly. He nodded slightly.

44

Science Fantasy

“ Captain Rawson could have destroyed the enemy
more easily had he had his ship in fighting trim and
had he not been under the compulsion of bringing the
alien back.”

Admiral Simmons sat back in his chair, pushing
against the table edge. His knuckles looked like walnuts.

“ We have only just in time seen through this. We
could have gone on and on, worrying about the device
and losing battles in space as a consequence. Think of
the laboratory space we’d have consumed trying to find
out what the thing did — ! ”

Captain Matsu said: “With respect, sir. I feel that
there is something not quite explained yet.”

“ Yes, Matsu? ”

“ We have been losing ships out of proportion beyond
Endymion. The aliens can throw fleets about like picket
boats. I feel it my duty to put on record that in my
considered opinion the continuous and unremitting
attacks on the Gobi convoys are not based upon the
ordinary use of spaceships. The aliens can concentrate
and disperse so that our convoys cannot be adequately
protected at all times. I think that the device has
something to do with this.”

Ombebe creased his forehead. “ I will only add,” he
said shortly, “ That what Matsu says is correct as far
as the dispositions and speed of the aliens are
concerned.”

You had to admire Matsu, Rawson considered, not
without a twinge of bitter amusement. With his pomaded
hair and his precise manners and charm, Matsu looked
the ladies’ man, the fop, the brainless dandy. He would
not have been seated on this committee had he not —
along with the others — possessed the sharp brain and
penetrating intellect of a first class navy officer — and
that little something extra.

The conference was against Matsu. The tremendous
wash of relief that swept over them when they realised
that the alien device was a decoy, a dummy dreamed
up to flummox them and make them waste effort on
it, overbalanced and piddling thoughts of caution. Even
Rawson, tired and fed up — ^perhaps because of that^ —

The Contraption

45

felt that at last they had beaten the Brute cleverness.

He voted along with the others that the device be
considered a trick.

Matsu insisted on his right to submit a minority report.

Something that Matsu and Ombebe, between them,
had said somewhere, buzzed around like an irritating
gnat in Rawson’s overworked brain. The conference
broke up and he went back to Lynx, happy to be able
to tell Commander Rawlins to look lively and unship
the tackybeam’ projector and ship Lynx’s full quota of
Wodens. (Rawlins was standing duty temporarily whilst
LeRoy got the feel of his artificial hand.) Lynx might
be an old G & S battleship, outdated and due for the
scrapheap; she was Captain Rawson’s baby and he
loved her with a fierce possessiveness never accorded
any woman in his life.

Sub-Lieutenant McGrath — a man now after his experi-
ences in space even though he was only nineteen — passed
Rawson in Number three starboard passageway. Rawson
stopped him.

“ Seen Hoftby around anywhere, subbie? ”

“ No, sir. He’s left all his kit aboard, though.”

“ Right, thanks, McGrath.”

“ Oh, sir — ” McGrath was diffident. “ Will there
be — uh, that is — ” He slowed down and stopped in
confusion.

Rawson smiled. It was a gentle smile. “ Is it a girl,
McGrath? ”

“ Oh, no, sir. My mother’s on Mars on holiday, and — ”

“ I’ve no idea what our orders will be, son. We may
have to space out tomorrow. But see Commander
Rawlins. Tell him that if — no leave it. I’ll see him
myself.”

“Oh, thank you, sir — ”

“ Commander Rawlins has been a Torpedo Officer,
y’know, subbie. And you know what they say about
those.”

“ Worse nut-cases than gunnery officers, sir, with
respect.”

“That’s what they say.” And Rawson, walking away,
actually laughed. He laughed. Strange what your own

46 Scioice Fantasy

ship and its intimate, petty but infinitely important
problems, could do to a skipper.

When he saw the Commander the progress-reports
were good. Rawlins had worked the men hard. Their
full thirty Wodens would be shipped in their outrigger
balls, magazines filled and armour belaying-points bolted
on in record time. The impatience in Rawson dictated
speed and more speed j he had the spaceman’s itch. He
wanted to be out in space as soon as was humanly
possibly. He sent the ship’s company off bn a trimmed
twenty-four hour pass and secluded himself in his state-
room — a more spacious and comfortable apartment than
his spacecabin.

Colonel Holtby found him there.

Over drinks, Holtby said casually : “ I can’t help
noticing that Brute you brought in is lying out there on
the desert. Having fun? ”

There was absolutely no chance of Rawson telling
Holtby the truth. The TI man ventured to strange
places. The less he knew the better Earthmen would
sleep in their bunks.

“Oh, some. That job’s out of the way now, though.”

“ Good for you. At the moment I’m in theoretical
disgrace.”

“ Hard lines,” Rawson sympathised. “ But, y’know,
Holtby, there must be a way down onto Cudham I.”

“ It’s yet to be found.”

“ Oh, yes, quite so. But — ”

“A planet completely englobed by debris, rocks,
stones, metallic fragments, charging about like a herd
of crazed cattle. It gave me the shivers, I don’t mind
telling you.”

“ It doesn’t seem right, somehow, that worlds like that
should roll through space. A man ought to be able to
let down on any planet in the habitable sphere around
a sun.”

“And the same remark goes for the Brutes, too,
I suppose.”

“ It went for the Nabos, you’ll recall.”

“ Yes. Well, they’re one bunch of aliens who are
friends, now: their war didn’t last long.”

The ContraptioB

47

Rawson did not reply. Instead he rose and flipped
open a star chart and gazed down on the pictured repre-
sentation of that long empty haul between Endymion
and the Gobi cluster. Then, as though speaking unwill-
ingly, he said : “ One of the gravest faiflts of a super-
scientific civilisation is the need for specialisation
destroying free traffic of ideas and a spontaneous interest
in the other man’s work. You mentioned your mission
to me only after it had failed and you were sick to your
guts. Had you succeeded you wouldn’t have told me
a thing.”

Holtby looked uncomfortable. “Right, Rawson. And
for God’s sake keep it to yourself. Professional honour
is all I have to rely on — ”

“ I intend to pass on certain information to Admiral
Simmons. Perhaps — ” Rawson picked up his black cap.
“ Perhaps it would be best if you came along, colond.
This could be — I pray it is — ^the most important — ”

“ Is it necessary? ” Holtby was stififiy formal.

“ Yes. You’ll see. Come on, man ! ”

They left Lynx and Rawson was almost running.

“ Of course it’s obvious,” he said to Admiral Simmons,
“ and of course it’s simple. But then, the best plans in
warfare are just that. They fooled us with their device.
They aren’t going to fool us a second time.”

Admiral Simmons swung his basalt face at Holtby.
The two were well matched. “ I’ll request permission
for you to come along with us. Colonel. And — ”

“ You're coming. Admiral? ” Rawson was shocked.

“ That is correct.” A brief pause. “Captain.”

“ Sorry, sir.”

“ 1 was fighting in space with the Cougher-cannon
— which was a step less efiicient than the Woden Mark
One. And we didn’t have umpteen petticoats of armour,
either.” Simmons’ chunky body stiffened at the recollec-
tion. “We’ll take the whole committee. After all, it is
our pigeon. This is what the committee was set up to do.”

All Rawson could say was: “Aye, aye, sir.” And feel
a fool.

The feeling that he was a fool persisted as Lynx took
space and flicked into that otherspace and ate up the

48

Science Fantasy

parsecs across to Endymion. Captain Matsu, standing
very firmly on his rights, had insisted on having the Brute
device fitted into a niche in Lynx’s already overcrowded
control room. It stood there on its pedestal, shorn of
the booby traps, glowing with its pseudo-life that even
the violence of energy from the tackybeam had not
destroyed.

Simmons called up the C-in-C at Endymion and
managed to chisel two destroyers out of him. The tiny
fleet headed out into the grey wastes of otherspace,
fleeting for Cudham I.

“ My God ! ” said Pluaski, looking into the screens
as Lynx came out into true space alongside Cudham I.
“What a broth! ”

“ If you can find a way in — ” Holtby said.

“ With the admiral’s permission,” Rawson said softly.
“ I don’t believe we need to. We ought to sit here and
pick them off like sitting ducks.”

“ If they don’t pick us off first.”

There was, naturally, no answer to that.

In the next ship-day they watched a convoy glide
past, punching ahead stoutly, the freighters bucking with
their Raybrookes — slower than the Stellengers but
terrible weight-lifters — with the lean armoured shapes of
escorts trying to be in four different places at the same
time. Lynx herself was lying stopped in otherspace close
up against Cudham I. Every single one of her picket
boats and pinnaces was out surveying the broil of rocks,
along with those from the two destroyers. Finding a
passage looked as remote now as ever.

Academic discussions started among the waiting
oflicers, as men always found something to discuss in
the expectant hours before battle, anything to relax
tautened nerves, to take away the fear that clawed at
all their minds. Heroics, of course, were out. A man
did a job and sweated fear and perhaps failed and
perhaps managed to hold on. Only one thing really
held true — man was a stranger in space.

“And so are those damn Brutes,” said Pulaski
viciously.

“ They’re using very fast and very tough cruisers out

The Contraption

49

here.” Matsu kept himself hovering about his alien
device. He was like a broody hen with a strange egg.
“Lynx should be good enough — ”

Rawson let that by.

He wasn’t, he had to admit to himself, one hundred
percent confident of the old ship handling more than
a couple of opponents. The destroyers would help, of
course; but their fire power was slight, their armour
negligible and their only defence a dazzling speed that —
in theory — took them out of the smashing showers of
alien shot. And the Brutes leaped on the convoys with
dreadful speed.

Two convoys went past, distant clusters of blips on
the screens. The third, on the fourth ship-day, did not
pass so easily.

Watching that slaughter. Admiral Simmons cracked
his back straighter, and dug his fists into his pockets
with a cloth-tearing savagery. “ If only we had more
ships! ” he whispered.

Earth never did have enough ships to cover all her
comings and goings in space. The convoy was struck
by the Brute wolves, slashed and ripped and tom and
left, bloodied, to limp on. A fast escort group swept
in — some commodore had been using his brain — but the
Brutes vanished from his screens, vanished from other-
space as they had so often done before, left the Terrans
seeking wilding in emptiness for a foe that had gone.

Everyone in Lynx's control room snapped to quiver-
ing alertness. Admiral Simmons uncoiled his fists, and
his fingers crooked as though he was choking the life
personally from each enemy alien.

“ We’ve got them I ” he said. “ By God, we’ve got
them! ”

For the Bmtes disappeared from the ken of the escort
group screening the sadly battered convoy, faded out of
otherspace and swept in triumphant formation into real
space, right on the doorstep of Cudham I.

At once Lynx was taken through to real space.

On the screen above the vast curve of the planet, the
alien ships showed clear. Four of them. Filing down onto
the hellish porridge of rocks and metallic fragments.

50 Science Fantasy

holding a course that took them, it seemed, to inevitable
destruction.

All Lynx’s dazzlement equipment was working at full
gain and, shadowed by the bulge of the rocky sphere, she
lay undetected. Undetected — for the moment.

The first Brute vanished beneath the layer of planet-
ary debris. It was like seeing a diver vanish beneath the
sea.

Then Rawson was in position. His thirty Wodens
hammered their rattling bass, the two destroyers joining
in with a shriller descant. Across space the sleeting leaden
chunks spewed in a deadly shower that ripped into the
armour of the alien cruisers, smashed in, tore down their
defences, ploughed on to disintegrate with awful energy
on the hulls.

Two Brutes died without firing a shot. The fourth and
last got off a half-second burst and then she, too, was
pulverised by the storm of shot from Lynx and her two
destroyers.

“ So they were using Cudham I as a base,” said Holtby.
And there was a vast satisfaction in his voice.

“ Yes,” Rawson said, angry and annoyed. “ And one
of ’em has slipped through your confounded barrier of
rocks! ”

“ Greedy,” said someone. Rawson, in a shocked moment
of surprise, thought it was Admird Simmons.

“ Yes,” he said. “ Yes, I am greedy. I want to knock
every damn one out of space! ”

Captain Matsu was stirring himself in his comer. No
one bothered to spare him time; they were all watching
the screens as Lynx stalked over the spot the aliens had
occupied when attacked and destroyed.

“ Can you see anything? ” demanded Rawson of the
ratings at the optics.

“ No break, sir.”

Not a single break in all that swirling confusion of
ddbris below. Rawson conned the ship carefully, the pilot
taking her in close to that roaring maelstrom.

Captain Matsu approached Admiral Simmons and
saluted with curious punctilio. " Beg to report, sir, that
I can con the ship down.”

Tbe Contraption

51

“ What’ Simmons swung towards Matsu. Then he,
like all the others of the committee, turned to stare at
the alien device Matsu had brought aboard.

It looked just the same.

“ When we passed exactly over the co-ordinates where
the alien ship vanished below,” Matsu said precisely.
“My instrument showed that. The colour flushing indi-
cates quite clearly that an opening exists there.”

No one bothered to question Matsu’s judgment. They’d
been calling the thing ‘Matsu’s baby’ and no one had
missed the careful ‘my instrument.’

The proof lay in that the alien had found a way.

Rawson said softly. “ Pilot, take her back over those
co-ordinates. Then taken your orders from Captain
Matsu.”

“ Yes, sir.”

The hum Of machinery, the flicker of energy rippling
behind the panels and setting an electric tension in the
air, the repressed breathing of two dozen men were the
only sounds in the control room. Even the eternal whine
of the air system — never normally noticed — began to
obtrude itself. Rawson found a comfortable space along-
side Matsu. He stared at the alien device that had been
made amid laughter by the aliens — if they laughed over
things like that — ^to trick and deceive the scientists of
Earth, to make them waste precious effort in unravelling
a chimera.

Earth had seen through the joke, had unmasked the
trick. For that device was the most outrageous mass of
nonsense and thumb-awkward engineering that any tech-
nician might dream about after a night on the tiles. It
couldn’t be used for any useful purpose. It was a bluff . . .

Lynx strode back over the co-ordinates and a rippling
flush of crimson welled across one comical lobe, a clear
signal. Matsu gave a crisp order and Lynx turned, slowed,
began to let down towards those grim rocks clashing
below.

There followed four hours of fear. Four hours in which
Matsu, following that crimson flush like a terrier after a
rat, guided the ship through a miraculously opening
passage. That passage could never have been navigated.

52

Science Fantasy

let alone found, without the crimson wash of colour giving
peremptory signals. Rawson, sweating in silent fear like all
the others, watched the screens as rolling masses of plan-
etary rubbish passed to either side, as the ship insinuated
herself between orbiting clumps that appeared waiting for
her arrival to close up and crush her like an orange in a
mixer.

He had it figured now, of course; as they all had. Old
Matsu would be cock-a-hoop over this — if he brought
them through alive. Twice — and only twice — Lynx grazed
a small planetoid, their mutual gravity about the same
but their mass variant — and only the petticoats of armour
saved the Terran ship. They could all now realise that
the alien device had served a double bluff; in acting up
its decoy complexity it had effectively cloaked its further
— and entirely alien — character as a homing device.
Rawson had a few words to say on that subject.

Matsu looked as though he had been placed lengthwise
on a plank and the entire ship’s company had jumped on
him.

Coming back — if they ever did — Rawson would handle
that alien pilot; that was a promise he made himself. The
aliens had a beacon broadcasting somewhere below, prob-
ably. Maybe not. That was what Rawson wanted to talk
about.

The alien device flushed a glorious orange all over and
slumped back to its usual ripple of rainbow colour.

The screens showed the encircling rocks above — and
a clear expanse below with the vasty curve of a blue and
green planet sweeping away magnificently.

“ Through ! ” said Captain Matsu. “ I hand you back
your ship. Captain Rawson.”

Rawson had no time even to say thank you. “ Guns ! ”
he shouted urgently. “ Alien bearing ninety-one degrees —
red. Declination — nil! ”

“Waiting for us,” gnmted Admiral Simmons.

Lynx sprang wildly as the pilot took her away on an
evasive action course. The Wodens were chattering on
their outriggers, shaking the ship. Crashes sounded aft.
Everyone knew that this could be their deaths — Lynx, an
old battleship was barely a match for the fast, powerful

The Contraption

53

Brute cruiser smashing at them.

With all space over the planet filled with the insane
garble of radar-interference, no torpedoes dare be loosed.
It depended on the guns. And Lynx shot divinely. Raw-
son saw the tell-tale flare as their leaden shot vapourised
in horrible power on the alien armour, saw the ruddy flare
as hits struck the hull. The Brute turned away.

In the moment of triumph, as the whole after section
of the alien was crumpled up and she stopped firing, a
stonn of shot pierced Lynxes armour, smashed away her
defences and a single leaden alien bullet smashed into her
control room.

When the smoke and fire and the shambles had been
cleared, Rawson and Admiral Simmons looked in stony-
faced grief upon the wreckage. Captain Matsu, Comman-
der Pulaski, Rear-Admiral Cyrus Q. Ombebe, a dozen
more — gone, vapourised, vanished in that destructive
eruption of released kinetic energy. McGrath was nursing
a shattered wrist. Bits and pieces flew with lethal force
when a strike was made. Here and there blood spotted
the decks and bulkheads from those men not immed-
iately vapourised.

“ We got her,” Simmons said. “ We know the secret of
Cudham I. We can send ships here again with the alien
decoy device as a guide.” He did not look at Rawson.
“ Take her home, captain.”

“ Yes, sir.” All that Rawson had been going to say,
about Earthmen tending to think of aliens too much in
Earthly terms, of their forgetting that aliens were dien —
and that although the Brutes fought in space with weapons
very similar to those used by the Terran Navy, their
instruments and techniques might very easily be so differ-
ent as to escape immediate recognition. As this device.
Who still knew how it operated? It flushed to crimson to
guide them through the planetary debris, glowing to show
them the way, as an old fashioned ground control sent
out dots and dashes to bring a ship in along her landing
lane. The men of Earth needed to learn a great deal more
about alien ways of thought before they could be sure of
their handling of other races in space.

“ At least,” he said softly. “ We can now garrison

54

Scieace Fantasy

Cudham 1 and prevent the Brutes from tearing our Gobi
convoys to pieces. That, at least, we can do.”

Admiral Simmons turned has basalt face to the screens.
Up there the road back lay barricaded by the rolling
rocks and metallic fragments, through which only alien
science would take them. He said : “ Lynx is an old ship,
Captain. We should have had better armour. It is too
late now. One day, one day, pray God, we shall turn the
Brutes into friends, as we have done with other alien
races.”

“ I think we shall. Admiral.” Lynx rose and began
nosing into that hellish barrier. Rawson kept his eyes fixed
on the crimson flushes of colour racing hotly across the
pearly lobes of the alien jest which had been fatal for so
many good men. “ I think we shall. Somehow I feel cer-
tain that the Brutes did enjoy making this; did chuckle
over their joke, just as we would. Yes, I think we can
come to terms with people like that, one day.”

After a long time he added “ — when we have beaten
them to a jelly, of course.”

Kenneth Buhner

55

BLAST OFF

Astronaut's thoughts

from the Finnish

When I get around this bend I shall be able to see it.
There is sure to be a crowd in the enclosure — will they
shout or fall silent? Some of them smug, glad to be shot
of me, some of them crying big selfish tears, sure that I
shan’t be coming back, hating the thought, loving the sen-
sation, licking up the tears; most of them not even rubber-
necks, just big shots who’ve fiddled a ticket for the take-
off — the people who can fiddle a ticket for anything but
they only come to show the other fiddlers that they can,
they don’t even really want to gawp. There will be a few
people who understand what it’s all about, just a very few
who realise that this is the break-through, that it is going
to work. That it has to work. That this is the machine
that will make Man free of the universe. If it works. And
it has to work, like I said. Johnny thinks it will and he’s
been in on this from the beginning.

Yes, well, there it stands, that’s the thing you have to
ride on, next stop the heavens ha ha and don’t think you
aren’t scared don’t let anyone think I’m scared I mean
I’m don’t anyone think I’m not scared oh you know.
But anyway there it stands and I suppose like the
man says it has a kind of stark beauty and all — long and
slim and pointing up to the stars my destination and don’t
anyone think I’m oh hell. But it certainly does look kind
of fine at that: good clean lines and the things like wings
on the sides relieving the sweep of the line but not what
you’d call a fancy design, more functional really, but then
it does have a kind of special kind of mystery and appeal
bound up with all that mankind’s-hopes-and-fears stuff
although this time it’s only a one-man star-trip. One-way

56

Science Fantasy

too, most likely. (Let’s not go into that again, do you
mind? Thanks). They even have songs written about it
already, like TTie Day He Comes Back What A Day
It’ll Be yeah that’ll be a day but you know it’s one man
one way and the rest of the race can chase me.

Look I really do advise you not to pursue that train
of thought, son. So alright of course I do get to come
back, but I don’t have to bank on it as though I was
stupid or something, do I? So let’s say I’m for sure com-
ing back sure there’s plenty of fool in the tank — ^there
goes my unconscious or something making very cheap
jokes — but there is plenty and I wish they’d just shut up
about it, simply. In a moment I have to climb up there
and ride that thing and they don’t have to climb anything
or ride anything except oh hell call this a take-off more
of a kick-off I call it but the benefit to humanity is never-
theless blah blah blah.

Oh all right, so I like humanity, but I still wish they’d
shut up. And stop assuming that I’m not scared.

All my short life I have wanted to be the first man to
go to the stars and was trained up for it most of my life;
not a mere man but a Project and all humanity cheers : oh
his heroic sacrifice and he’ll come back one day and what
a welcome we’ll give him and boy are we glad it’s him
and not us, no, what a glorious pioneer, saviour of
humanity but why doesn’t he hurry up and GO? What
a sucker he turned out to be and we’ll see he gets his
name in all the history books is bunk unless he comes
back which might be embarrassing and perhaps bad for
trade.

Still it is a beautiful machine, no breadboard lash-up
this, no prototype with all the bugs still in it but a
masterpiece of simple design, clean, erect, ready for
business (nearly there now) my old man would have
admired the craftsmanship he was a very good artificer I
should have stayed with him and learned the trade then
I wouldn’t be here all famous and terrified SHUT UP!

I can see mother in the crowd all gentle and proud
and just quietly crying in a happy sort of way: I wonder
whether she has any real idea what this is all about and
what sort of a crazy son she had and do you suppose she

Blast Off

57

cares, as long as I don’t get hurt and boy are you going
to get HURT. There’s Johnny with her without whom
this project could never etc. and he’s smiling too as
though it was him and not me and the funny thing is.

Mother will know how I feel and all the mothers here
will know because this is like the very end of pregnancy,
the long wait is over and now there’s nothing for it but
HAVE it: too late for hot baths and jumping off the
kitchen table and the little Indian doctor that you-know-
who went to and you’ve had it now — now you have to have
it and now it’s going to come tearing out of you and they
say the pain is worth it but CAN’T I CHANGE MY
MIND but it’s worth it child and they can shove that too
anyway mother knows and she’s only crying quite happily
so perhaps. Look are you getting hysterical? Yes. Are you
though? No, not really, but, do you know. I’d really
rather, perhaps, on the whole, taking everything into
consideration, by and large, not do this. (Anyway, I’m
thirsty).

I can easily think of about five million things I’d
rather be doing this fine afternoon than go riding to the
stars on that Aing, for instance I’d rather go fishing on
the lake with the boys the sails so white they hurt your
eyes and the water so cold it hurts your dabbling trailing
fingers and you don’t care if you don’t catch any fish but
if you do, oh lake trout fried in an iron pan on a fire of
twigs and driftwood on the shore just a shake of salt and
some bread and then roll over and look up at the stars
and dream of joining their company, or maybe a trip
into the moimtains and the joy of your pistonning thighs
climbing and the heat beating off the rock and all day all
alone, you can really come to terms with what you want
to do about you know helping the human race and aU
and going to the stars and first man there and the human
race shall never want again. OK you’ve got it now it all
came true and there’s your human race — fair samples —
in front of you waiting to watch you do it and look at
them. The best are sad for all the wrong reasons, their
faces all crumpled and slack and uncomprehending, even
the ones you thought had grasped the idea. Most of the
crowd, however, have bright eyes and parted lips like

58

Science Fantasy

young girls at a bull-fight or old gluttons before a bowl of
tender baby crabs in boiling butter. All these I have loved.

(And now you are not so keen. Now the big talk turns
into actions which hurt the flesh and deeds which the
spirit cannot compass.)

SHUT UP.

And the women now are all around and crying and
wailing and carrying-on and I didn’t bargain for this, no-
one told me about this in the briefing, no-one said any-
thing about women shrieking . . .

“ Filiae lerusdem, nolite flere super me, sed super vos
ipsas flete, et super filios vestros. Quoniam ecce venient
dies, in quibus dicent: Beatae steriles, et ventres, qtd non
genuerunt, et ubera quae non lactaverunt.”

And now I’m at the top of the ramp and the technic-
ians are closing in around me, peeling-off my earth-side
outfit, checking the apparatus, there’s the artificer with his
hammer and eight-inch nails, the Public Relations man
with a crazy signboard to pin up over my head and
they’re counting down now and the ground-crew are
getting out the dice and the Met-men don’t like the look
of the cloud-ceiling and now you are not frightened any
more for your mother is still just crying happily and she
has always known the pain is worth it.

A sexta autem hora tenebrae factae sunt super universam
terram usque ad horam nonam.

Et circa horam nonam clamavit voce magna, dicens:

“ Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani? ” which, being interpre-
ted, is “ My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? ”

The end and start again.

59

For Professional Scientists Only

The detective story is highly respectable — a
stone into any Senior Common Room in Oxford or Cam-
bridge and you will hit a mystery-writer. Science-fiction
is not respectable — throw a copy of this magazine into
any Senior Common Room in Oxford or Cambridge and
you will start a stampede out of the door.

Why is this?

(i) Lurid covers. Serious, well-planned, thoughtful
writings by major writers in this field are still being
published with coloured jackets displaying strumpets
being stripped by ghouls; jackets which often have no
relevance to the matter they contain and certainly no
appeal to the people for whom they are written.

(ii) Sloppy science content. Far too few writers have
the basic equipment to write plausible fiction around a
defensible scientific possibility. More and more s-f writers
sketch out a vague bob in the direction of a scientific
advance then drag out their ray-guns and start blasting.

(iii) Ignorance of s-f’s merits. Thousands of people who
would relish s-f just don’t know that it exists as a valid,
if immature, literary genre.

I hope that some little progress may be made in some
of these departments if, for example, some serious, reput-
able scientists could be persuaded at least to think about
s-f a little. A prize of

FIFTY POUNDS

is accordingly offered for the best story written by a pro-
fessional, qualified scientist during the Summer of this
year. The prize will definitely be awarded however few
the entries. Any size of story may be offered but those in
the 5,000 - 12,000 words region will be favom^d, other
things being equal. The magazine reserves the right to
buy the winning story and any other entries at ciurent
market rates. Anonymity is promised if desired. The
editor’s decision is final. S.a.e. should be sent with manu-
script. And we guarantee that your work will not be pub-
lished inside a sex-maniac’s-dream paper-jacket.

Write to the Editor,

SF,

18, Norham Gardens,

OXFORD.

60

LAZARUS

by Jael Cracken

‘I am Lazarus come from the dead.

Come back to tell you all,I shall tell you all.’

T. S. Eliot.

The children, in their grey and black habits, entered
the Chapter Hall more soberly than usual. They were
going to hear a story told, a frightening but splendid
story which was so important that it was taking the place,
this morning, of Dynamical Sociality and Sexual Deport-
ment. They hurried to their seats, glancing shyly up at
the Holy Mother and the grey stranger on the dais.

“ Children” she said when they were silent, “You
were told yesterday of Mr. Eastmore and the important
part he played in shaping the world in which we all live.
Here he is to give you his own account of those distant
years before you were bom: Mr. Eastmore.”

The stranger beside her stood up, tiny beside the great
desk. He had a long, thin, miserable countenance studded
with sharp blue eyes: his glance was like a hatchet blow.
With no preliminary clearing of his throat or greeting to
the assembly, he began.

“To understand — ^to appreciate the age in which you
live, you must know that our Peace follows a terrible age
of positivism, the violent period of technology which
culminated in the twentieth century. I was bom in that
century — oh yes, old as I look, I was once a little boy
and used to get into as much trouble as I daresay you
young people do.”

He paused, expecting a general chuckle of appreciation,
but it was not forthcoming. ‘ 7 never strike the right note
with today's children^ he thought to himself; ’It’s more

Lazarus

61

than just a difference of age; perhaps they’re all too safe
to have need of humour.’ Irritatedly, he brushed away the
irrelevance and changed his attack.

It was Wing Commander Sladden who set in motion
what we may call the final phase. He burst unannounced
into my home early one August evening and flung me a
mock salute.

“ Jack,” he said, “ I have the most staggering piece of
news to tell you.”

It was quite an effective entry-line, considering that I
had not seen him for two years. That was always his way :
dramatising. It had been a rewarding trait — ability alone
could not have won him the fame he enjoyed.

“ Do come in Skylark,” I said (how Sladden got his
nickname is too long a tale for now). “ What’s the great
news? Don’t tell me the war’s over, or I’ll be out of a
job.”

“ It’s more staggering than that ; a signal has been
received from the derelict space station.”

Just three or four times in anyone’s life come shocks
like that. I could feel it strike my windpipe and slide
down into my stomach. The space age — after the event
that term was ironical only — had come and gone. Its
roots had grown from the second world war, its sturdy
trunk had been abruptly lopped by the third, which was
in its fourth year when Sladden suddenly reappeared
before me.

“ Don’t just sit looking like a streak of vinegar,” he
said. “Action, man, action! ”

“ Look,” I gasped, “ That station — the Dish — it’s
been deserted for three and a half years.”

The icy fingers started over me. I was often going to
have their pianissimo playing — but this first touch was
the worst. I’d always had a secret terror of empty places
. . . could there be anywhere more horribly empty in or
out of the world than that Dish we had left topside
when the war clamped down?

“ Three years, eight months it’s been empty,” Sky-
lark confirmed. “ Someone’s up there sending signals
now. Want to hear about it? ”

I nodded my head and pressed a button for Barbara.

62

Science Fantasy

Sladden was a man with a preoccupation, but he took
note when she came in; the pre-historic part of him
almost wagged his ears at her. Barbara has that asinine
effect on strangers. Fm immune. I don’t bite at rotten
apples, however good they look.

“ Note down our entire conversation, Barbara,”
I told her.

“ Top secret,” Sladden cautioned.

“ Miss Tedder is a grave of secrecy,” I told him.

So he gave me the story. Almost despite ourselves,
Sladden and I had been drawn into the space project.
We had watched and cheered together as the first tall
rockets laboured up from Woomera. Together we had
sweated and struggled through all the physical gruelling
that was a prelude to the Big Jump. Eventually, we had
taken the Jump. Sladden and I were the two heroes who
hurtled round the first man-made orbit in 1985.

What really got the two of us up there was what got
Man up there; math, not muscle.

The Americans instigated E.l — Establishment One,
the prosaic name for that space satellite which the press
dubbed ‘ The Dish.’ Dollars, sterling, francs, marks, even
a few piastres, began to stream into the sky. Ah, they
were the days to live in. Fulfilment! — ^Fulfilment with
promise! Of course, I’m prejudiced; I must admit I liked
seeing my face on the tele. But anyone who survived
the war will tell you of the excitement that swelled
roimd the earth.

The Dish was completed. It was like a miracle. No
lives were lost in the entire process, except for one ferry
which crashed into the Caribbean. It was finished on
schedule. It functioned admirably. It even cost no more
than estimated.

Then war threatened. The Eastern Bloc had waited
till the coffers were drained before they showed their
sword blades. By then, a one-man moon ship was on
the stocks. It left the Dish two days before war was
declared. Five days later it crashed in the Mare Imbrium.

For four months, on a curtailed scale, the U.N.
Government let us keep the Dish manned. But we were
a useful lot, and peaceful purposes were suddenly out

Lazarus

63

of fashion. We were brought down; grounded for Dura-
tion. We could all guess that Duration was going to
be a long time.

Sladden and I were separated. I was given an un-
pleasant job, the details of which I won’t bother you
with. I’m an unpleasant fellow, — I did not dislike it.
Sladden spent his time travelling a handfxil of miles
above the earth at Mach 2. I suppose he did not dislike
that, although it must have seemed small beer at first.

The war went on. Some little crooked intellect had
discovered that one of the tensor muscles in the human
cranium might, with due encouragement, bind down
and disable the brain; my task was to discover the right
encouragement, a vibration, the right decibel band . . .
It was absorbing. I forgot about the Dish.

Sladden did not.

“ The idea of that beautiful thing we had constructed,
swinging round out there dead, neglected, unmain-
tenanced, always preyed on my mind. I suppose I con-
tinually kept a mental frequency tuned to it ... Then
Beddoes contacted me. Possibly you remember him.
Jack. He was I/C communication at Woomera Base.”

Sladden broke off — not, I gathered, for dramatic
effect. “The war’s broken us. Jack,” he said; “Every-
where — secrecy . . . censorship ... It took Beddoes two
months to get the information discreetly to me; that was
three weeks ago, and the knowledge has been binning
me ever since. Fortunately I had this leave due, and
knew where to find you.”

I did not ask him why it had to be me. Already
I guessed what was coming. I foimd myself pacing about
unhappily behind Barbara; she has black, shining hair:
she wears it long to conceal those sharp, cruel ears.

“ What was the message? ” I asked.

“ Only standard procedure. ‘ E.l calling. Are you
receiving me? ’ No clue as to who ...”

“ ... or what.”

“ Or what,” he agreed. And then there was a silence.
As far as we knew, the only ways extant for climbing
up to orbit were occult ones.

“ Could it be some trick of the Bloc? ” I asked.

64

Science Fantasy

“ Why? How ”

“ No, silly question. Skylark — ” and there I stopped.

I was going to ask if, for some inscrutable reason, the
U.N. might have reoccupied the Dish; but even as
I framed the question, I formed the answer: if the U.N.
had reoccupied it, that would have meant Skylark and
me. Which of course led me straight to the next jump.

“ You want us to go up there and find out,” I said
hollowly, and the blood drained so swiftly out of my
head I could scarcely see him nod assent.

Nothing went well; the war went badly. The incon-
clusive, wasteful, spiteful business of technological war-
fare had seemed to turn in our favour. Beach-heads were
desperately established along the enemy’s Eastern sea-
board. Then the Bloc took fright, and dropped the
first hydrogen bombs. They struck out West and South:
London and Sydney reeked and reeled simultaneously,
and were swatted into the dust together.

In the ensuing turmoil, I was visited by General
Crigensis. I rose to attention as he entered my Dublin
office (Eire had been annexed bodily at the outbreak of
hostilities).

Crigensis hated me, just as I hated him. Now he told
me w'ith a harsh relish that I was appointed to a new
post. A high-sounding title went with the post, but in
effect it meant I was in charge of captured enemy equip-
ment in the North Far East zone. The transfer was to
take place immediately.

“You won’t be as comfortable there as you have been
in Dublin,” he said. As he left, he looked at Barbara
Tedder the way they all used to. She returned the look,
carefully and deliberately.

She and I took a trans-polar stratojet to Formosa : that
was to be my new H.Q. Up aloft, I had time to think
about E.l. No way of getting to the Dish existed any
more. The orbital computers had been diverted and con-
verted to military use; the precious fuel had been cached
goodness-knows-where; the great, lumbering ferry rockets
themselves had been broken up and used for scrap. But
had everything been all to hand, the fact remained we
should not have been allowd to go: two thousand miles

Lazarus

65

up, you’re of no service to the state.

As Crigensis had predicted, Formosa was not comfort-
able. A typhoon struck almost as we landed, and Barbara
and I were driven in pouring rain to an underground
warren. We settled in somehow, into an atmosphere of
suspicion .and hate. Spy-scares, promotion rackets and
rumours were in the air. I was under-staffed and over-
worked. Soon, I began to get queer ideas.

I began to believe that Sladden and I were being
summoned by a supernatural being to go aloft, to escape
the squalor, to live a free life miles above the eartih.
As the weeks drew by, the idea strengthened. There was
nothing to be done: frustration stuck in my stomach
like an ill-digested meal. I heard nothing more from
Sladden, nor had I any means of making contact with
him. The Dish must have ceased calling long ago.

Rumours accumulated that a V.I.P. was to visit the
island unannounced. On top of the gruelling routine
and the continual allegience-tests, this seemed like the
last blow. Consequently, when my faithful Captain
Kwong Si reported with an account of important enemy
ordnances and equipment captured on the edge of the
Gobi desert, I had half-decided to do the inspection
myself before I glanced down the list.

One item set my heart booming in my ears: Five
19,000-ton fuelled orbital rockets.

Leaving Barbara to worry over the paper work, I took
the next stratojet out.

High over China, guided missiles tracked us. We fused
two and eluded the others. Finally the Great Wall
showed below us. We sped down as night was faffing
and landed in the recently captiued township of Lokohr-
gashun. Five hours before we had enjoyed the mild
Formosan autumn: here the Inner Mongolian winter
was upon us.

Rest was far from me. I squeezed a staff car and a
reluctant lieutenant and we headed for the enemy dump.
The rockets were there alright. They stood three hundr^
yards apart from each other, lonely and splendid in their
launching bases. ^

Like a crazy man, I walked round them and climbed

66

Science Fantasy

up them and pried into them. They were exact replicas
of our own rockets; it looked as if a few plans had
quietly changed hands at some time. The lieutenant
sat sulking in his vehicle and probably thought me insane.
Temporarily at least, he was right. I had had what
amounted to an impromptu launching ground delivered
into my hands. The one vital thing missing was the
complicated mathematical equipment necessary to plot
courses and timings. With that — we could be off.

I stood up on the scaffolding of one of the giants
in a dry, cutting wind. The sound of gunfire was
carried from the low hills to the north. Everything was
dead about me, the metal shapes, the poor earth. It was
an ideal situation in which to contemplate my hopes —
and my fears.

Oh yes, I was frightened again. Now that there was
a possibility of attaining blast-off, the idea of a bene-
volent something calling to me vanished. I knew that
whatever was up in the Dish had to be something
inhuman. We’d left it empty; eerily, thunderously empty
. . . Whatever inhabited it now, I didn’t want to meet it.

Yet I was horribly curious.

Yet if by a miracle I — we — could get someone to
compute a course that would take us up to the Dish,
would I dare go? It meant facing a court-martial on
our return, if we did return.

I had no aptitude or stomach for raising potatoes in
the Amazon basin, or labouring in the undersea hatcheries
of the Tasman Sea, or whatever the current fashion in
so-called ‘ corrective training ’ was.

“Are you coming down, sir? ”

With a wave I acknowledged the existence of my
sulky subordinate, and climbed back to ground level.

Next day was spent securing a fuel-sample from nearby
subterranean tanks and trying to find out more about
the enemy rockets. I had little success. The technical
personnel had obviously been evacuated when the sector
was threatened. It seemed most likely they were going
to appropriate the Dish — ^possibly under the old delusion
that it would make a useful bombing platform — but this

Lazarus

«7

I could not confirm. If that had been their intention,
it raised another question. Had they too picked up the
strange signal?

Back at base, things had been happening. I could tell
that at once by Kwong Si’s face as he approached.
It made me feel tired: I wished Formosa had sunk
with all hands, I felt drunk with over-work and over-
worry.

“ Whatever it is,” I said, “ It’ll have to wait till I’ve
slept my eyes out.”

“ Sorry sir, this can’t wait,” he told me. “ The V.I.P.
has arrived in your absence.”

Like a fool, without waiting to hear more, I burst
into a rage. I even threatened him with demotion for
not having radioed me at Lokohr-gashun. I shook my
fist in his face and gobbled like a turkey.

“ You were quite right,” he said coldly; “ You did
need to sleep your eyes out,” and with that he turned
on his heel and left.

Alone, I rode the mile long escalator into the under-
ground fortress. Alone, I strode into my offices. Ignoring
half-a-dozen frightened filing clerks, I pushed through
the private door into my own apartments. A smell of
fresh cigar smoke haunted the air. The liquor cabinet
was open. Two empty glasses stood together on a table.

My study was empty. I opened the bedroom door and
flicked on the light. Barbara Tedder and General
Crigensis sat guiltily up in bed.

“ So you were the V.I.P. ! ” I exclaimed. It must have
been the surprise : I lost my self-control. I began to weep
with my fists in my eyes. Crigensis never said a word;
he buclded on his uniform and left, Barbara behind him.
I still cried. It may have been due to the strain I had
already undergone; or perhaps imder the hate Barbara
engendered in me, like a mirror lying on a mirror, lay
the opposite of that emotion. I don’t know. I was all
entangled with myself.

The fame that had been mine . . . The love I had
never known . . . The dread of being alone an3where . . .
They seemed to be the only strains in my Ufe’s tune.
I fumbled blindly at my hip, tugged the webbing holster

68

Science Fantasy

open, pulled out my service revolver. My hand would
not behave properly, but I got the weapon up to my head.

Someone knocked on the door.

I fired.

The door burst open. Perhaps — I forget — I missed on
purpose. I was still alive, lying stupidly on the floor.
Above me stood Sladden.

“ Hullo, Vinegar,” he exclaimed. “ Hunting the big
game in your lousy hair? ”

He put me to bed and drugged me up with stuff
from my own medicine chest. When I woke, I was sane
again — sane enough, anyhow, for the world I was in.

An aerial bombardment was in progress upstairs. I
’phoned my A.D.C. and Kwong Si and took a cold shower.
The A.D.C. put me in the pictiue while I was drying:
General Crigensis was carrying out his inspection as if
nothing imtoward had happened. When he had dismissed,
I apologised to Kwong Si for losing my temper and
inquired where Sladden was. The little captain asked:
“ You mean the fair man who piloted the General here? ”

"He’s fair alright, the rest I wouldn’t know.”

He went to get him, leaving me thinking hard. It
appeared my hours were numbered: I could not believe
Crigensis would want me where I was after what I had
seen. I seemed further than ever from the thing in the
Dish and didn’t know whether I was glad or sorry.
About every other aspect of the affair I was quite
certain I was nothing but sorry.

A tap at the door.

“ Come in. Skylark,” I said.

Barbara entered.

“ Wasn’t yoiu bed aired? ” I asked.

She flinched and replied, “ I’ve come from the General.
Don’t make this any more difficult than necessary.”

Now, I was feeling better, a sensation that makes me
cruel. “ The spectacle of young love is seldom, if ever,
anything but revolting,” I told her.

It was the word ‘ young ’ that stung her, that and
the memory of Crigensis’ cropped grey hair. Before she
could answer, Sladden was looking round the open
door. As I mentioned, his entries are always timed to

Lazans

69

pcrfeaion.

I made Barbara Tedder wait while he and I huddled
in a comer. He told me that Beddoes had received a
repetition of the message from E.l only three weeks
ago and had managed to transmit an answer which had
not been acknowledged; after which, Beddoes had been
hauled off to a nameless underground tribunal. It looked
as if a goodly portion of the world was becoming aware
of E.l. I use goodly to denote quantity, not quality.

Sladden received my news of the five captured rockets
with jubilation, and seemed little disturbed when he
learned why I was now feeling uncertain of my position.

“You’ve nothing to worry about, Jack,” he said.
“ You know who Crigensis’ wife is, don’t you? ”

“ Didn’t even know he was married.”

“ Still reading the highbrow papers ! Take my advice
— buy one with pictures in it. Crigensis married a niece
of the Prime IVEnister. He’ll make no trouble for you
in case your little story leaks home. He’s got too much
sense to jeopardise his future career. Believe me, you’re
now in a position to ask him favoiu^l ”

Our eyes met. “ The computer ! ” I breathed.

I turned back to Barbara.

When the familiar sick ache in the entrails had passed,
the horizon had already drawn itself into a curve. At
the extreme limit of that curve appeared a curve of light;
there, someone was watching the sun set. We sped
soundlessly upwards, the curdled blackness of earth’s
night yielding to the sweet dark of space, and stm
flashed along our metal flank.

“ Good to be back here,” Sladden sighed.

“ Four long years,” I said. Earth looked so silent from
up there: war, man himself, might never have existed.
Whether that would have been any loss is not, perhaps,
for Man to say.

The Dish itself was still hidden from us by earth’s
bulk. Indeed, at this early stage of our journey, it lay
almost direaly behind us; ahead lay the point where its
orbit and ours would intersect. Before that time, the Dish

70 Sdence Fantaqr

would make one and a half revolutions, carrying its un-
known inhabitant with it.

“ ‘ What may this mean

That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel.
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon.

Making night hideous' "

“ What did you say. Jack? ” Sladden asked.

“ Shakespeare,” I said. “ You want to stop reading
those lowbrow papers with pictures in ’em! ”

“ Glimpses of the moon,” he echoed. “ It’s a pity
while we’re up here we can’t pop over and put a few
flowers on Teddy Auden’s grave.”

Ted had piloted the moon-ship which never came
back; Sladden and I had known him well.

“ He might have been able to tell us what goes on in
the Dish,” I said.

“Oh, alien invaders, undoubtedly . . . Moon men
take over Earth’s first space station’!” he scoffed.

“Even that wouldn’t surprise me.”

We said no more; the silence became steely, unbreak-
able. Even in the shallows of space, close to a planet, an
impression of immensity stamps itself firmly on the sen-
ses. A word is too trivial a thing to impinge on the par-
secs of silence.

Also, there was the ordeal of entering the Dish. That
had soon to be undergone. The thought did not make for
light conversation.

Slowly we closed with our target. The blackmailing of
Crigensis had given us access to Manila’s SLKC-HK,
the big cybernetic brain known familiarly as ‘ Slick
Chick.’ It had provided us with all necessary course-data.
Before leaving Formosa, ostensibly on leave, I had told
Barbara in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm which I was to
regret later, “ Even the enemy’s fuel formula was identi-
cal with ours. Someone on our side has made a fortune
out of a murky deal. We’ll worry about that when we get
back.”

She had just looked at me.

SLKC-HK had done its job impeccably. We slid along-
side the Dish with a matching velocity. Sladden shot out
a pair of magnetic grapples which locked against the great

Lazarus

71

bowl-shaped hull and we felt them tighten and pull us
firmly into the orbit of the Dish.

Possibly you have seen photos of the Dish. It is what
was known as a Maccleston’s modified Ross-Smith design.
The living and working quarters form a circle behind an
immense, dish-like, solar reflector, which turns perpetu-
ally to the sun and provides the power. Drawing up to
the main hatch, we of course turned into the dark side;
only earth light gleamed along the great convex bulk
above us.

Sladden snapped his fingers in triumph and pretended
to feel for his latch-key. He was almost gay. Then he
turned and gazed enquiringly at me: I did not meet his
eyes.

“ One of us ought to stay here,” I said huskily. “ You
go over.”

Sladden spoke no more to me. I might have ceased to
exist. He looked sharply away and unbuckled the secur-
ing straps about his legs and body. We already had our
external suits on; now he donned his helmet too, sealed
it and tested the join with the manual vacuum. He
shucked over to one side and crawled back into the air
lock. Several times I made to speak — but nothing came
out.

Through the scanner I watched him swim the interven-
ing nothingness, the yellow rear light of his helmet grow-
ing smaller. He opened the hatch of E.l — slowly it
opened to reveal a black oblong — and vanished inside it.
The hatch closed again. I was alone: just I and the cold
fingers.

What transpired in there I discovered later.

Sladden found the light in the air lock was not work-
ing. He switched on the headlight in his helmet and oper-
ated the air-flow. It functioned, which was not surprising,
despite the light failure; the Dish had been laboriously
constructed with as many independent circxiits and cells
as possible, for reasons of safety.

The atmosphere in the lock had built up to the stan-
dard five pounds per square inch before Sladden glanced
at the dial that indicated air pressure into the corridor
beyond: it registered zero: there was vacuum both sides

72 Science Fantaiy

of the lock! Shrugging, he pumped the air out again and
stepped through into the corridor.

TTie short, straight stretch to the next door was feature-
less. The lights did not work here. He walked to the door
and pushed it open; it offered some resistance and closed
of its own accord. There was air in this compartment at
a pressure of one and half pounds. Still no illumination
apart from his headlight.

He was now in the circular walk that, regularly seg-
mented by safety doors, led right roimd the Dish. As he
moved slowly forward, blurred reflections of his head-
light rippled along with him, one on either white-painted
wall close beside him. Until now, he had been stirred
with excitement at finding himself back in the deserted
station. Now, the mufiSed sound of his own boots and the
similar cadence of his heart worked together to shake his
confidence.

When he reached the first side door, he paused. This,
as he knew, without reading the stencilled notice on it,
was a Fitters’ Shop. Pressure inside: zero. He thrust
open the door. Ironically, lights burned. Sladden looked
over the deserted equipment, almost expecting to see
something move. The air from the walk was whistling
gently past him, and after a few seconds he closed the
door again.

No sign of what had caused the air loss. A meteor
perhaps . . . Perhaps a stress had developed, tearing
two plates apart . . . The Dish had always been a
horrifyingly rickety struaure. Then belatedly the realisa-
tion struck him —

“ Who’s here? ” he called.

Someone or something had put that light on.

Goodness knows, we had left the Dish hurriedly enough,
left it all intact, but we had at least switched off the
lights.

Sladden leaned against the wall, waiting for an answer.
He pulled the vac-gun from its side holster and clutched
it in his steel hand ready for use. But there was nothing
to shoot at, and in a minute, pulling himself together, he
moved on again. He determined to make for the radio
room without further delay; it was fruitless — and a little

Lazarus

73

too exciting — ^to examine every compartment as he came
to it.

“ Pm looking for a green carrot with five pseudopods
and a taste for drinking liquid oxygen through a straw,”
he called. His morale did not bother to laugh in answer.

The radio room door was in a lighted segment of walk.
Vacuum lay the other side of the door. Sladden stopped,
all too aware of his isolation. He had to enter, better
sooner than later; nevertheless, he hesitated. Here, after
all, was where the original signal had originated.

“ Come in,” a voice said.

Sladden stood with one hand on the white door and
his mouth open wide. Tepid little tracks of sweat ran off
his shoulders and down his back, and a stupid numbness
worked round his veins.. Whatever else was in his mind
then, he must have realised he was close to something
human destiny had never faced before. One moment he
almost stampeded back down the walk, the next he thrust
open the door.

In the airless room the lights burned bright. There was
a window here looking out oh the starfield, which seemed
to turn as the Dish performed its endless gyrations.
Apparatus ranged the walls, a confusing assortment of
communicating devices. In the centre of the floor, a table
stood. On the table lay Teddy Auden. He was watching
Sladden through eyes as readable as jeUy.

“ Is it you, Ted? ” Sladden asked at last.

“ Yes, Skylark.” He spoke as if he had a rope tight
round his neck.

“ You crashed on the moon four years ago.”

“ I — got back here.”

“You crashed on the moon four years ago! ” said
Sladden, his voice rising. “You’re dead, man — ^you’re
dead! You died long ago! ”

The prone figure raised itself, clumsily and heavily
with the weight of its space suit.

“I told you I got back here. Skylark.”

“ You’re dead,” Sladden whispered. His limbs shook
with a sudden palsy and he pressed back against the wall.
“ You’re dead,” he repeated, but the ashen face regarding
him through the glass helmet was unquestionably Auden’s.

74

Science Fantasy

“ How did you get back here? ” he demanded.
“ Where’s your ship? ” The shock strangled his voice, and
even clouded his gaze, so that a dichromic effea ren-
dered this terrifying reality even more terrible.

“ I did not crash on the moon. I was — incapacitated.
When I got back here, the station was deserted.” The
words came slowly. “ I could not get down to earth in a
non-atmosphere ship. I had to stay here.”

“ Then where’s your ship? ”

“ I failed to secure her properly. I was — not myself.
She drifted off.”

Sladden was standing upright again now. He had
regained some composure, while drawing comfort from
the vac-gun in his hand.

“ You’ve lived here close on four years, alone? ”

“ Has it been as long as that. Skylark? ”

“ Every bit as long . . . How did you live? ”

Auden was sitting upright on the table now. His dull
eyes fixed Sladden’s imblinkingly.

“ Food . . . Air . . . Water . . . They were here.”

Silence. Inside Sladden’s head, racing thought.

“ Auden,” he said, “ We picked up the signal you sent
from here. How come you never answered ours? ”

“ Uh . . . receiver wrecked. Meteorite . . .”

“ The equipment all looks alright to me.”

“ Look, Skylark — I’m not well. Take me down to earth
will you. That’s what you came for, eh? ”

The stars wheeled outside like sparks going up an
everlasting chimney. Cold stars, cold steel, cold men . . .
nothing with any heat or juice in.

“ I can’t take you back, man ! ” Sladden burst out.
“ There’s something wrong here ! You — you — I know
something’s wrong. You couldn’t have survived — ^Wait!
Answer me this : we only picked up a signal from you six
months ago: how was it we didn’t hear two or three
years ago? ”

Auden said slowly : “ I called. Nobody could have been
listening. Look, I want to get taken down to earth . . .”

It was just possible he was speaking the truth. And in
time of war, if anyone had received the signal they might
so easily have discounted or perforce ignored it. Each

Lazanis

75

item of Auden’s tale was just possible by itself.

“ You have to understand, Skylark — ”

“I can’t take you down, Auden! I daren’t risk it. I
don’t believe you’re Auden any more. You’ll have to stay
here, even if I have to stay with you.”

“ You’re being foolish now.”

“Maybe. But there is something all wrong about this!
I have just one crazy idea in my head and I’ll tell it to
you. Suppose Auden landed safely on the moon. That, I
grant, is possible— even likely; Auden was an individual-
ist, and his last message was, “ I’m just going to put
down. From now on I’m too busy to chatter, so I’m
switching you lot off until I’m ready for you.” When we
never heard again, we had to assume he had crashed,
although through our telescopes the ship appeared un-
harmed.

“ Alright. He landed, and decided to go outside before
bothering us. Suppose he walked round the surface, and
while doing so he picked something up — a seed, a spore,
pollen, an5rthing of that kind with a germ of life in it that
was able to stirvive intense cold. This seed may have lain
there a long span of years, it may have blown from the
far corners of the galaxy, it may have borne a type of
life unguessabie to us . . . And in the warmth and air
of the moonship it might have lived like a leech on
Auden’s spirit’s blood, until in the end it could crawl
into and command his husk of body. How do you answer
that. Monster? ”

The head shook inside the motionless helmet. The
words came slowly, “You’re mistaken. Your imagination
is too riotous. You — ”

“ I’m going to leave you here, whatever you are. I’m
going now. (^n you stop me? ”

“ You’re wrong. Skylark, you’re wrong. You have not
understood — you’re mistaken. Please take me down — ”

“What? To feed like vampires, to multiply like a
virus? — ”

He broke off. Auden had raised his arms and slithered
off the table, stomping towards him. The table fell over
backwards, the stars jerked slightly then resumed their
circular march.

SciMce Fantasy

7 «

Sladden fired once wildly out of panic and jumped
for the door. He miscalculated in the low gravity,
cannoned into the side and sprawled over the raised lip
of the doorway. As he fell, the vac-gun exploded again,
the shot screeching down the walk, and he crashed against
the floor. The frontal glass of his helmet took the blow
squarely. It shattered into several pieces.

Helplessly, Auden stood and watched the painful fight
for oxygen which was no longer there. It was soon over.
The man from the moon bent down and took hold of the
body. He commenced to drag it towards the air lock

As he worked along, the great gash in the calf of his
suit opened and shut like a dumb mouth.”

Jack Eastmore paused briefly. He stared over the heads
of the Children of the Universal Church, out through the
tall windows and across the flatness which stretched from
Westminster to Marylebone. For a moment he seemed to
regard past, present and future simultaneously; the vision
faded and he resumed his tale, the sardonic note back in
his voice.

“ While, for what felt like an age, I waited in the ferry
rocket ” (he said) “ I resumed my favourite occupation
and began to consider m37self. I had acted all along with
amazing foolishness. The absurd compulsion which had
lifted me and Sladden to the Dish had ruined my future.
I saw, above all, that free from my siuweillance Barbara
Tedder could easily work my ruin— even without Grigen-
sis’ help.

I could comfortably be accused of conspiring with the
enemy, revealing astronautical secrets, dereliction of duty,
abuse of power . . . and be whipped quietly away as I
landed again.

This idea had had much time to circulate when I saw
two figures emerge from the Dish and slowly approach
my ship. I presumed the active figure to be Sladden: who
the other was, I could not guess. It was only when they
had huddled and crushed through the lock and were
cramped into that little compartment with me that I saw
the dead was alive and the alive dead.

When I was fit to understand, Auden told me what
had happened in the Dish.

Lazarus

77

“ Now take me down to earth,” he begged.

I just sat at the controls shaking my head.

" You must go down,” he said. “ Believe this. Skylark’s
not really dead — I am not really dead. But by the time
you have landed we shall both be beyond trouble. I have
written an explanation: here.”

He thrust a paper at me. His hand was bare, a purple
mummified paw. Somehow, seeing that, I believed hhn.
I pulled myself together, retract^ the grapples, fired a
one-second burst of power.

During the long supersonic glide down, I had plenty
of time to make up my mind. So I landed outside the
enemy capital.

The Bloc forces took only twenty-five minutes to reach
me; in half an hour I was in the hands of Marshall Sub-
jaerof and the two bodies were in a laboratory. They
were dead alright. Less attention was paid to me than to
Auden’s brief message. It said:

“Biology is a tnmcated worm whose ends are un-
known. Nobody can say what the beginning of life is, or
what the end of life is. Guesses only.

“When I left the moonship, I tore open my suit on
a ridge of stone. I suffocated. For something like a year
I lay in limbo on the moon. Then I became aware (rf
myself and returned slowly to the ship. Both my mind
and my body had become — like dank, unfamiliar houses;
the essential T’ of myself, on the other hand, had become
the dominant part. With prartice I could control some
of myself. I returned to the Dish. Here I shall wait, for
ever if need be.

“ I am beyond medicine. But I am not dead, for
here I cannot die. No life can come into being except on
earth. No death can come into being except on earth. This
is all my message.”

Ajter the story, old Jack Eastmore walked with the
Holy Mother across the flatness. The children had dis-
persed for the day and would not return till evening
worship.

"It was fortunate for you that Marshall Subjaerof
belonged to a dissatisfied religious faction waiting to rebel

78

Science Fantasy

against the Bloc leaders” the Mother said.

“ Yes, it was,” Eastmore assented. “ 7 was the spark
that touched o§ the powder. They were successful, and
three months later were suing the UJ^. for peace.”

“ God moves in a mysterious way” she send.

Eastmore chuckled.

“Why the note of amusement? ” she asked.

“ It was all a question of biology,” he said. “ Yet the
world took it for a religious sign. I was quite a prophet,
you know. Me! — Bringing the Wordl ”

“ We still take you as a prophet” she said firmly,
“ Although it was all thirty years ago — thirty years of
abiding peace. The Lord works through worldy men you
know, Mr. Eastmore”

This time he laughed with more of his old confidence.
“ It's always nice to know you've brought perpetual peace
to the world,” he agreed “ — Even by accident! ”

A wave of fighters of the Squadrons of Perfect Free-
don, roaring low overhead, drowned his last sentence with
the shriek of their engines.

THE END

Never stir up a Jack - in - Office : he is
probably less dangerous there than he
would be at large. Pepkinson s affair with
the dormant Empire, for instance, was just
a matter of time ....

UNAUTHORISED

PERSONS

by John Runciman

Chief Controller Pepkinson interrupted himself with a
polite yawn, then continued to dictate : “ . . . ‘and while
rejecting the charge of incompetence levelled against this
Office, we reaffirm and must herewith emphasise that we
cannot be held responsible for any accidents to our opera-
tives attributable to chance or Act of Space.’ Thankyou,
Miss Sedley. Sign off with the full title — you know, ‘Chief
Controller, Office of the Control of Uninhabitable Worlds,
Hampden Poyle, Deneb VI.’ Hampden Poyle, Deneb VI
... a very fine address. Miss Sedley. We are indeed for-
tunate to be situated so near to the centre of things.”

She adjusted the big, saccharine smile reserved espec-
ially for him, aware, as always, that only his old-fashioned
prejudice against robot oflSce-staff kept her in her lucrative
job.

“ You gathered what the letter was all about, I dare-
say? ” he enquired, airily flicking a speck of dandruff
from the sleeve of his crisp pink jacket.

“Well, ... I got it all. Chief Controller.”

“ Good. You understand, it is always necessary to em-
ploy the loftiest possible phraseology when in a position

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Science Fantasy

of this importance. No joke, my dear young lady, having
two hundred useless — ahem — uninhabitable I should say,
worlds on one’s hands and a stubborn, highbrow, self-
opinionated gaggle of archaeologists digging away on them
and producing nothing worthwhile to show for it from
one year’s end to another. Especially now that the Supreme
Board are pestering me to increase our productivity —
“ justify our budgetary estimates ” forsooth — in short,
simply putting me in a damned awkward spot. Which is
why I leave for the planet Atumin tomorrow; I shall con-
tact this Professor Bullock and personally investigate his
ruins. He has been instigating quite a little fuss recently.”

“ I do hope you enjoy yourself. Chief Controller, Atur-
nin sounds awfully romantic.”

“ Ha, it hardly resolves itself into a case of enjoying one-
self, my dear young lady. It’s a case of necessity leading
where the devil drives ... You had better send in
Copperfeldt with the Aturnin file.”

“ Certainly Chief Controller.” Miss Sedley rose grace-
fully, well aware of the eyes dropping to her knees as she
uncrossed her legs and stood up.

“ Oh, and Miss Sedley ...”

Was the stuffed shirt going to make a move at last?
He could hardly be forty, yet he behaved like an old
man. She had worked for him for three weeks and nothing
had happened. She rolled her large grey eyes and said,
“ Yes, Chief Controller? ”

“ Tell Copperfeldt to come in quietly. I am unable to
accustom myself to these Denebians’ surplus pair of feet.”

“ Very good. Chief ControUer.”

“ Oh, and Miss Sedley ...”

“Yes, Chief Controller?”

“ How about having dinner with me this evening,
before my little spatial perambulation? ”

Professor Bullock was the ideal type for excavating one
of the Controller’s unwanted worlds. He was a long-
limbed, long-lived man from one of the border suns with
about two hundred years of his life-span still to run
(accidents barred), and a definite taste for solitude. A
CUW ship had landed him with his paraphernalia on

Unauthorised Persons

81

Aiurnin twelve years before and he had burrowed quietly
down into the ice rind of the dead world with no com-
pany but an assortment of servo-mechanisms. He was, in
faa, one of culture’s cheapest and most patient long-term
investments.

He awoke this morning feeling disgnmtled. He would
have to deal with another human being, and although he
had not seen one for close on seven years, the prospect did
not excite him, despite his having voluntarily signdled for
inspection. Those asses at CUW would certainly send a
prize mutton-head, if he knew them. As yet he did not
know how prize.

After a brief meal, the professor walked into one of the
garages in his compaa little two-acre H.Q., climbed into
an enclosed truck and drove out through the airlock onto
the surface of Aturnin. It was the first time he had been
out here since the location of the H.Q. had been settled.
There was nothing to tempt him out. Thick overcast hid the
planet’s two suns in a perpetual blanket of gloom, while
the groimd was bogged knee-deep in a gooey blue treacle
of liquid oxygen. It woidd be cold to a degree, the degree
being about minus one hundred and ninety. In twenty
minutes, all being well, the important visitor would land
here; the professor sat relaxed — why should he be
worried? There was something far more important than
an executive two hundred and fifty feet below the frigid
syrup he stood on.

He would have been less confident and comfortable,
perhaps, if he could have seen down into those deep,
deserted halls beneath him. Among the shadows that h^
lain in silence for over eight thousand years, among the
debris and dirt of a vanished world, a light moved. It
was a flickering beacon, glowing as if afraid of the very
darkness it dispelled. Carrying it was a crazed man who
staggered as he walked. His eyes gleamed crimson in the
smoky light. In his other hand, he carried a heavy
chopping knife.

This shadow among the shadows emerged from a
crumbling house and made its furtive way along a littered
thoroughfare. On either side yawned black doorways that
filled with menacing, sliding silhouenes as he passed.

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Science Fantasy

Suddenly, from one, a figure leapt, a stick upraised in its
hand. Even as it struck, the man with the torch screamed
and screamed — ^the terror of finding life lurking where
only death should be. His torch fell to the floor with him
and lay guttering there as its owner was dragged into a
side chamber and propped against a wall. Suddenly
alarmed by the enfolding echoes, the attacker picked up
the still-burning torch and raced back along the way his
victim had come. A great door closed behind him and
darkness resumed its reign. Dust settled again over every-
thing.

4 : * > 1 :

Guided by Bullock’s radio station, which circled Atur-
nin perpetually in close orbit, the Chief Controller made
a good landing at the appointed time and place. He
climbed out towards the waiting truck, resolved, inside
his new space-suit, to be very much on his dignity and
tolerate no nonsense from this archaeologist fellow, and
that for a very good reason. On his journey out here, the
Chief Controller had used his leisure by popping the
substantial CUW file on Aturnin into the ’viso and
scanning it through. It had not taken him very long to
see that here was something sensational. The monthly
beam-reports from Bullock had poxired steadily into
Deneb VI and there they had one by one been glanced
through and stuck on the telefile. Each in itself, dryly
worded, carried little to attract attention, but when read
consecutively even the C.C. coiJd gather their import.
And he should have read them consecutively long months
ago. They told the story, no less, of the gradual discovery
of the capital city of ^e almost mythical First Galactic
Empire. And Pepkinson had let them moulder on his
files! He broke into a sweat of profuse self-concern to
think what would happen to him if this neglect became
generally known; but fortunately he had possession of the
file and control over the professor. The latter should not
be hard to deal with, for the C.C. knew his scholarly
types — hence the extra pomposity in his greeting to
B^lock.

The professor was hardened to governmental condescen-
sion and indifferent to patronising airs; moreover, he did

Unauthorised Persons

83

not give a hoot about the other two hundred and six
worlds under the C.C.’s control. He drove his visitor
slowly back into his H.Q., which hung to the icy table-
land like a soap bubble to a man’s fist. Once under the
dome, he jumped down and helped the distinguished
visitor to the floor.

“ Well, professor,” Pepkinson said expansively, “ Here
I am, the most suitable and — if I may venture to say so —
the most influential person to lend ear to your trouble.
Spill the proverbial beans.”

“ You’d better get the general picture clear first,”
Bullock said coldly. “ I suppose you know this is a
binary system? ”

“Naturally I do. I believe I can even tell you the
names of the stars, if I have a moment’s reflection ...”

“ Atumin and its satellites revolve round Bah beta, a
white dwarf which is the minor component of the Bah
alpha and beta system. Bah alpha being a red giant. They
make quite an incongruous couple. I shall not bore or
baffle you with all the figures, but you must know that this
planet circles rotmd Bah beta in just over thirty years at
a distance equivalent to Saturn’s distance from Sol. Beta
takes eight thousand years to make one complete ellipse
round the common alpha/beta axis, its course varying
inversely with its mass ratio to alpha, the giant — but I
will not load you with facts you will have learned at
school.”

He glanced enigmatically at the C.C., who said “ Quite,
quite.”

“ Conditions on Atumin vary considerably over the
eight thousand year cycle. For most of the time, when
beta is distant from alpha, it is roughly as you see it now,
with half its atmosphere frozen onto the surface. Alpha
is only a bright star, and not visible through the cloud.
But as beta nears its companion and gathers speed, chan-
ges take place. Alpha grows apparently brighter and
finally the stars pass so near that Atumin is heated con-
siderably. Near the perihelion of the two stars, over a
period perhaps of two hundred years, the planet’s atmos-
phere is liberated and we would then no doubt find it
inhabitable. Atumin is approaching such a period of heat

84 Science Fantasy

now, as the two suns draw together after their long separa-
tion. Each day alpha grows brighter.”

“ I read all this on the files, professor. Show me some-
thing interesting. Where are these wash basins you dug
up? ”

“We’ll come to those shortly. One other factor varies
conditions here. The eight-thousand year cycles are not
all alike; they are part of a larger pattern, for alpha too,
naturally, is swinging about the common axis. Sometimes
the suns pass a comparatively long way from each other,
when alpha is at the furthest point of its orbit. At other
times, they pass comparatively close. Their last perihelion
was very near, and this coming one will be even nearer.”

“ Does this really have much bearing on yom digging? ”

“ It has every bearing on my researches. These are no
idle astronomical figurings I give you. Chief Controller.
They are the vital background against which the peoples
of the First Empire lived and moved. For lack of data,
my calculations cannot be precise, but I fancy that Bah
alpha and beta may pass closely enough in a hundred and
fifty years for Atumin to be wrenched off its present orbit.”

" Indeed? ” The C.C. was a little red in the face. He
preferred something tangible — like wash-basins — to spe-
culation. “ I can’t see that these theories do anything but
detract from your appointed task of excavation, pro-
fessor.”

Bullock snorted and flung open a store door. “Your
lavatory bowls are in here,” he said.

With a sound like a sigh, the little cage carried the
two men down through the ice pack, below and away
from the well-lighted confines of the H.Q. It felt like a
fall into the interior of the planet. After his recent inspec-
tion, the C.C.’s attitude had undergone a slight change.
Under his boredom and superiority, excitement grew. The
formidable mass of stuff the professor had accumulated
left no doubt he had made a genuine discovery, and
Pepkinson found himself promising Bullock trained
assistants, historiographers and all the facilities of modem
research for the Atumin site. Now in the lift, cooler-
headed, he was promising himself something; that this

Usaothorised Pmoos

85

cantankerous streak of erudition should be got rid of. The
ruins seemed as likely a place as any.

They stopped. “ Planet face,” Bullock announced.

A pair of steel doors greeted them. Bullock took a key
from his belt and unlocked.

“ What are these doors for? ”

For the first time, the archaeologist showed embarras-
ment. “ You must understand,” he said, “ that some large
rodent-like creatures live down here. This city, in its hey-
day, was enclosed from the air and heated partially from
the interior of the earth crust, so that breathable conditions
still obtain here, irrespective of conditions on what is now
the surface. Also, owing to blockages, I have explored only
a very small area and it is possible that larger beings may
have survived and mutated in the dark. And again, I am
alone here, and occasionally my mind plays tricks on
01C • • •

His cautious words gained something sinister from the
gloom in which they now stood. The lights — fed from the
miniature all-purpose plant in H.Q. — were dim and the
atmosphere was dusty. Near them stood the factotum robot
that performed such duties as digging, boring, bull-dozing
or structural jobs. They were in some kind of old roadway,
broad and flanked by solid but ruined buildings.

“ The roof has collapsed here,” the professor commen-
ted, “ but the buildings have taken most of the strain and
now support it. At one time they must have been forty-
storey skyscrapers. There was a mass of rubble to clear
away — ^you can’t get into these buildings or behind them
because they are packed tight with compressed debris. An
area of solid wreckage extends some considerable distance
to left and right here.”

He moved over to a light platform truck. “ If you will
mount this truck with me, we will travel to the scene of
my most recent finds.”

The C.C. climbed up and they moved slowly off. A
small headlight lit their path.

“ Not very cheerful,” Pepkinson commented. “ I suppose
all this dirt was caused by the roof collapse, but it makes
it hard to form any sort of general picture.”

“ Not at all,” contradiaed Bullock quietly. “ With a

86

Science Fantasy

little imagination, it is easy to recreate the lives lived here.
I should have died of boredom long ago if it was all as
uninteresting as you seem to think. Now this building on
our right — buckled and smashed as it is, you can still see
the flawless mastery of detail that went into its decoration.
They loved elaboration, these dead masters of the First
Empire. Their factories were as rich in design as a Gothic
cathedral. That particular building was a printing house.”

“ How on Deneb do you know that? ”

Bullock paused. “ A thorough acquaintance with my
monthly reports would have made that question un-
necessary, Chief Controller. I have been operating here,
apart from one spell of leave, for twelve years. One of the
earliest tasks I set myself was that of resolving the dead
Atumin language for myself. I reported having done so
two years ago.”

“ Yes, of course, of course. The point had momentarily
slipped my memory. In the Control of Uninhabitable
Worlds, you realise you are but an insigniflcant unit
among many.” ‘ And soon you won’t even be that,’ he
added to himself.

“ Ah, we’ll stop here for a minute ! ” the archaeologist
said with excitement, seeing something that interested
him even more than making a counter-snub. He stopped
the truck and jumped down, switching on a powerful
torch. The mighty roof sagging above them was higher
here, and a fine building stood with six floors intact.
Beside it a gigantic pile of girders and masonry reached
up to the roof. Beside it stood dead and shattered trees,
eerie and silent, with monstrous webs stretching from them
silted up with age-old dirt.

“ What’s this place? ” Pepkinson asked, glancing back
nervously into the darkness from which they had come.
They were less than a hundred yards from the cage-shaft,
and he did not feel like venturing further.

“We are nearing the centre of this beautiful city,”
Bullock replied. “ This was where I made one of my most
valuable discoveries. The building is — was — a recording
tape factory, where all that was valuable, or interesting
was recorded for the general public to buy. We have the
same industry flourishing on our worlds today. It was by

Unauthorised Persons

87

selecting and listening to records taken from here that I
learned to speak the Atumin tongue.”

“ Oh, you speak as well as read it ! ” exclaimed the
C.C., and realising that was naive, he added, “ I think it
would be fitting if I investigated the structure. Is it safe
to do so? ”

“ It stood at least eight thousand years, the probabili-
ties are it will bear up a half hour longer.”

“ You’d better go first, just in case.”

The lavishly carved wooden doors stood partially open,
just as the professor had left them long before. A fresh
pile of debris lay in the hallway and over this they
climbed, and then through another door, chased in
patterned brass. Bullock flashed his torch about. Pepkin-
son also produced a light and scuffled round interestedly.

“ This was the shop where the records were sold,” he
announced, his voice hollow in the vast room. Like a small
boy exploring, he ran excitedly behind counters and past
racks still packed full of spools. “ It’s wonderful ! ” he
cried, “ Wonderful ! The First Galactic Empire — ^here ! ”

The other man walked reverently over to an audition
booth and sat down on a chair by ffle powerless amplify-
ing apparatus. Who had last sat here? What had he or
she looked like? He relaxed into a dream. In another
hundred and fifty years, the. oxygen ice would evaporate
and this city would see the light of day again. He should
still be alive and hale them, and would be content if only
he might see the sun streaming into these wonderful
ruins, bringing light and colour. And then the eternal,
unsolved question overtook him: how did the city get
under the ice? What catastrophe must have happened to
bury it so deep?

He glanced up, and gave a cry. A face was peering in
at him. Then he realised it was his own face, reflected in
the dusty glass of the booth. Bullock shook himself. So
often he had imagined that the Atumins had not all
died . . .

Leaving the booth, he looked about the hall. No sign of
the Top Brass. Bullock tutted in annoyance. Then two shots
rang out. Another. They were followed by a heavy rumble
that sounded like a minor earthquake. The glass in a door

88

Science Fantasy

at the far end of the hall shattered and fell noisily onto
the mosaic floor. Through the gap billowed a dense cloud
of dust. Bullock ran to the door and opened it. Out of the
murk, an obscure figure staggered, choking and wheezing,
and covered in powdery dirt. Bullock took him roughly
by the arm.

“ What the deuce are you playing at, you — you novice?
You’ll collapse the whole place over our heads. And what
are you doing with a gim down here anyway? ”

“ I — I — ,” the C.C. spluttered. “ I was going down a
passage out there, and there was a hole in the paving
ahead — and suddenly an animal jumped out on me. I
had to shoot in self-defence, and all the floor caved in.”

“ It would only have been a rodent.”

“ It was the size of a St. Bernard.”

“ I’d better go and have a look. I’ve never been through
there.”

“ I’ll come with you.”

The dust was settling. There was no sign of any animal
life. A little stream of mortar and plaster trickled gently
into an underground cellar that was now almost entirely
filled with rubble. Pepkinson pointed speechlessly ahead.
Where before had been a seemingly impenetrable moun-
tain of brick, a tunnel had appeared, its low ceiling shored
up by the accidental collapse of beams.

“ That wasn’t there before,” the C.C. gasped. “ The
mouth of that tunnel was blocked by all the rubbish that
plimged into the cellars. Let’s see where it leads to.”

“ Most unwise. The cellar may collapse into a lower
cellar, or that dangerous looking ceiling may fall in. If
we are killed — finish. If we are trapped — finish. There’s
nobody to rescue us here.”

But the fever of exploration was in the Chief Con-
troller’s blood. After all, it was his tunnel. He plunged in
clumsily, bent double to get past the low beams. Observ-
ing, not without surprise, that the fool appeared to have
courage, Bullock followed resignedly. Shortly, he was
glad he did so. The tunnel, an ancient cloister of some
kind, curved right through the unscaleable pile of wreck-
age and when they had crawled and crept through it, they
came into open space again. Both men pulled up and

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89

stared about in awe.

This looked like the heart of the city. The streets were
narrow, as if intended only for pedestrians, and the win-
dows and doors were high and elegantly proportioned.
Here the roof was still in place, almost invisible above
them. By mutual consent, they started down one of the
thoroughfares. In the torchlight, these graceful facades
had a funereal elegance. Overhead ran light and graceful
bridges and ramps. Away ahead, the buildings stopped
for an open space fringed with dead trees, and beyond
that again rose an immense round structure, colonnaded
and decorated, and rising into the dark like a chord of
music. At the extreme range of their light beams, it looked
like a splendid white dream.

They walked towards it down the littered thorough-
fare. On either side of them yawned black doorways, fill-
ing with uneasy, sliding silhouettes as they passed. “ It’s
all uncanny,” the C.C. muttered, and even the hardened
archaeologist agreed. Crossing the empty square, they
climbed broad, shallow steps and so came into the great
building.

“ Look at those murals ! ” Bullock exclaimed. Reach-
ing from shoulder level up to the ceiling, in unbroken
succession round the walls of the great hall in which they
found themselves, were paintings hardly de-flowered by
time and executed by a great and eloquent hand. A
sweeping staircase and eight doors led from here into
other parts of the building — and there was a ninth door,
taU and wide and closed by a massive, ornamental handle.
Propped by one of its portals was a battered notice board,
and towards this they went.

There was writing on the board. It was in English. It
read:

UNAUTHORISED PERSONS ARE WARNED

THAT TO PROCEED PAST THIS POINT IN

SPACE OR TIME MAY RENDER THEM

EXCEEDINGLY LIABLE TO PAINFUL

HUMILIATION EVEN.

“ Who do you think put that there? ” the C.C. deman-
ded, blankly.

“ English . . . English here? I can’t understand . . .”

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Science Fantasy

“Heavens, yes! I never thought of that! Your calcu-
lations must be wrong Bullock. This place must be far
more recent than the First Galactic Empire. You’ve made
a boob! We must go in and see what it is all about.”

In a whirl of mixed emotions, Bullock could only
gasp, “ But it says — ”

“ Look here, my dear Bullock, if the Chief Controller
of the two himdred and seven Uninhabitable Worlds is
not an Authorised Person, I’d like to know who in the
Galaxy is? Besides, it may well be two hundred and eight
or nine by now. Come along.”

The door slid sideways into the wall and they walked
in, Bullock nervously, Pepkinson with a swagger. The
door slid quietly shut behind them. Both men jumped.
Pepkinson went over, pulled it open a fraction and peered
out with his torch. Darkness. Silence. When he let the
door go, it slid shut. His teeth chattered. “ Pull yourself
together, Bullock,” he said.

“ The power supply must still be functioning in this
sector,” the archaeologist whispered, flashing his torch
about.

The room was not large, only about twenty feet square,
and ten feet high. Close by the door, encased in glass,
was a heavy machine. Spreading from it were many rods
which ran about two feet apart, across the floor, up the
walls and met on the ceiling, so that the chamber was
encircled by them. They were protected from touch by
plate glass that entirely lined the room. On the near wall
were a number of imposing dials and a red lever. There
was also a notice on the wall in the tall, graceful letters
of the Atumian tongue.

“ Shall I read you what that says? ” Bullock asked
impressively, indicating the notice. “ It says, ‘ The penalty
for tampering with this time device is confinement to the
present.’ A time device. Controller, a time device. The
men of First Empire knew secrets we can only dream of.”

“Let’s get back home,” was the response.

Scientific detachment won the day over shame-faced
nerves, and investigation of the device soon proved fruit-
ful.

“ It is obviously devised for a special purpose,” Bullock

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91

remarked. “ The whole room seems to be intended for
a shuttle between two times, for this major red lever here
slides over an uncalibrated scale that merely has ‘Now’
stamped at the right end and the Atumian ‘plus’ sign at
the left, evidently a time in their future. If the thing
works, and as the power functions I see no reason why it
shouldn’t, we might well switch on and try the ‘Now’
end of the scale.”

“ Kindly do no such thing, Bullock. We should per-
haps find ourselves thrown back into the days of the First
Empire.”

“ Perhaps? If this functions at all — definitely. The
‘Now’ could refer to no other time. And that would fulfill
my dearest dreams beyond their wildest expectations.
Don’t you see I’ve worked among the remains of these
gentle people so long that I almost belong to them.”

“ Gentle? You could hardly expect them to be gentle
if we barged in on them unexpectedly.”

“ Well, I”ll move the lever over to the right and see
what happens. It’s safe enough, there’s a foot pedal con-
trol down here marked ‘ Starter,’ and I won’t touch that.”

The lever could traverse an angle of ninety degrees
betwen the ‘Now’ and ‘Plus’ terminals. It rested no more
than about a degree and a third from the ‘Plus’ end.
Bullock seized it; it was vibrating, gently. He pulled it
over and back to the other end of the scale. As the lever
moved, so the rods behind the plate glass swrmg and
regrouped themselves, settling round the room in a
different pattern.

The two men looked askance at each other. Both were
pale.

“ You’d better press the pedal, now we’ve started fool-
ing aroimd,” Pepkinson said.

Bullock did so. His foot pressed it level with the floor
and at once dials flickered before him and lights came on
overhead.

“We asked for it! ” Pepkinson yelled, his frightened
voice scarcely audible above the whine of engines. Under
its glass casing, the motor was alive; little was to be seen
except one glowing tube, but from under the casing tore
a crescendo of noise. Rising up the audibility scale, the

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Science Fantasy

noise built into a thin scream and cut out. There was a
sound like a thunder clap. Visibility during that ear-
wracking interval had also been affected. The chamber
seemed to crumple about them like a battered carton, to
blot out completely — and then normality returned. Bullock
recalled shakily the similar effects that occurred when
space ships hurtled successively through sound and light
barriers. Had they now broken through the time barrier?

“ You’ve wrecked the works, Bullock,” the C.C. told
him in evident relief. “ Come on, let’s get back out of
this ruin.”

He turned away and found himself in the hands of two
uniformed guards. Two more closed in and pinioned the
professor’s arms.

“ We’ve made it ! ” Bullock shouted. “ We’ve made it !
Oh, Pepkinson, how wonderlful ! ”

“Are you mad? Wonderful indeed! These boys don’t
seem to share your enthusiasm. Let me go, you hooligans.
I’m the Chief Controller.”

But they were propelled irresistably to the door.

Recalling the Atumian language through his wonder
and bewilderment, Bifflock said to the guards, “ No need
to hold me tightly. I have no intention of escaping. I have
come a long way to meet you. Kindly take us to someone
in authority.”

“ That’s where you are going right now,” one of the
men replied. By twisting his head, Bullock could see the
four were uniformly dressed in elaborate and soft clothes.
They seemed to be unarmed. They looked remarkably
unsurprised at the arrival of their two captives. Casually,
one of them began to open the tall door.

“ They’re going to take us into the ruins and shoot
us! ” Pepkinson said. His voice was flat. He had forced
himself into a bitter self-control. Chief Controllers don’t
cry.

The door swung back. Outside, the hall of murals was
brightly lit, fresh and clean. From the door where they
stood, right across the mosaic floor and into the open,
wound a long queue of people, quiet and alert. TThiey
watched with interest and obvious amusement as Bullock
and Pepkinson were marched out and down the shallow

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93

steps. Fear and embarrassment tortured the C.C., but
Bullock rapturously drank in every detail. He was back
in the flourishing days of the First Galactic Empire. His
beloved ruins had sprung into life. Behind them now spread
the imposing facade of the building they had left. About
them was an open space with trees growing and people
promenading; music sounded. Ahead, were the very
streets he and the C.C. had lately come by, torches light-
ing their littered way; they were still recognisable, but
much altered. Signs glittered, wares were on display, men
and women walked and lingered and talked. Back to life.

There was little time for observation. Bullock glanced
up and saw the roof high above them covering all of this
part of the city, and then he was ushered with Pepkinson
into a vehicle and they were driven away. Instead of
going through the shopping centre, they branched right
and over a bridge, making their way among spacious
gardens and tall buildings. Slender ramps bore walkers
high above roads and flowerbeds. Slowly they circled left
down a wide way. Even Pepkinson had dropped into
silence in his absorption at the scenes about them, and
then suddenly he pointed and cried, “ Look Bullock, that
building over there — ^

Bullock recognised it at the same moment. “Yes,” he
said, “ It’s the recording-tape factory. This is the very
road I have excavated — somewhere in the future.”

It was a strange sensation. Where rubble and decay
had piled high were lawns, trees and a fresh breeze
blowing. In a minute they passed the spot where the
archaeologist’s cage-shaft would be — at some problemati-
cal point in the future. Then they emerged from under
the high roof, although many smaller buildings still
fringed their route. A blue sky appeared and in it hung,
midway to zenith, a great red orb. Bullock recognised it
almost instinrtively. It was not Bah beta. It was, must be,
alpha, the giant.

They turned abruptly up a drive and stopped before a
fine sprawling house.

“ Get out and follow me, please,” one of the guards
said, opening a door for them. Leaving the other three,
Bullock and Pepkinson allowed themselves to be led

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Science Fantasy

indoors, through a richly appointed hall and into a room.
Over against a v?ide, empty fireplace stood a tall, white
haired man dressed grandly in black and yellow.

“ Here are the two time-travellers, Jat Ehrlick,” the
guard annoimced.

“ Thank you. You may withdraw.”

The white haired man approached the two of them
and said, in Atumian, “ Greetings. You I think,” address-
ing the professor — “ are Professor Bullock? ”

“ I certainly am,” replied Bullock, amazed more by
this greeting than anything that had happened so far,
“ Were you expeaing us? ”

The white haired man smiled and said, “ I was. But
before the explanations, introductions.”

As he spoke, two ladies entered, smiling, one a matron
and the other a dark haired girl of about thirty.

“ This is my wife Galen, and Dorin, my unmarried
daughter. My name is Ehrlick and I am one of the Jats,
or noble ruling families of this city of Atumin.”

Introductions all round. After an interested look at
Dorin, Pepkinson said, “ Tell this fellow I am of some
importance. Ask him if we are prisoners.”

Bullock made a rough translation.

“ You are not prisoners, certainly. But you must allow
yourselves to stay with me, it it does not inconvenience
you too greatly. We hope you will be able to help us here,
for you come upon us at a time when our existence and
the existence of our world is threatened. Were this not a
time of emergency, I hope we should treat you more
ceremoniously, visitors as you are from other time, other
space.”

“You have been more than kind, Jat. But there are
so many questions we have to ask you — ”

“ Bullock, ask his daughter if she feels like teaching
me some Atumian out on the verandah.”

After more discussion, a plan was decided upon. Ehrlick
decided his explanations would be aided by practical
demonstrations, but Pepkinson refused to budge. He was
too tired, he said. It was agreed that he would stay here
with Dorin, who should try and teach him the rudiments
of her language, while Bidlock made a short flight over

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95

the city with Ehrlick and his wife. Secretly, the professor
was delighted with this arrangement, as every moment
spent with the C.C. was distasteful to him.

As he walked with Ehrlick onto a paved walk at the
back of the house, he said apologetically, “ I hope you will
not find my associate ill-mannered. He is overbearing
because of Ae responsibility he bears in his own world.”
He explained the nature of Pepkinson’s post. Ehrlick and
his wife were staggered.

“Two hundred and seven uninhabitable worlds! He
has every right to be overbearing! Yours must be a most
mighty empire! ”

“ I am afraid it does not — from me at least — command
the reverence yours does, Jat. Your empire is known to
us as the First Galactic Empire. Please tell me, how
many planets lie in its federacy? ”

Ehrlick pulled a wry face and said reluctantly, “ I am
afraid you will be disappointed when I tell you — only
twelve.”

He was right. Bullock was disappointed. The title First
Galactic had been dreamed up by a myth-mongering
journalist of his own age, and the truth hardly came up
to expectations. Little wonder none of its worlds had
been found — so many uncharted planets lay beyond the
narrow limits of the Sixty Systems. As they made their
way over to a crimson helicopter that stood in the grounds,
a space ship rose about two miles away, climbed on a
pillar of smoke, turned into a twinkling point and van-
ished into the upper air. Ehrlick’s wife laid a hand on
Bullock’s arm and said gently, “You see that ship,
professor? It is the last foreign ship leaving Port Atur-
nin. The others have gone, back to their home planets.
We are alone, as a race, for the first time in many cen-
turies.”

“ I don’t understand, madam. Why are they leaving? ”

“ Because this city is doomed. In a few da]^ its glory
will be over.”

* « * «

As the ’copter climbed, Bullock told his story. EhrUck
and his wife Galen listened with interest but almost with-
out comment, their faces sad. Then the archaeologist

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Science Fantasy

begged to hear what was happening now.

Galen began the story. “ You find three things here
which are recent innovations. The first two are this great
dome which is planned soon to cover our city, and the
time device by which you came here. The two have been
forced upon us by the third — that terrible monster up
there! ”

She pointed to the red globe of Bah alpha, climbing
across the sky. “ Normally, this would be night in our
peaceful realm, but for centuries, growing steadily in the
heavens, one bright star has blossomed and now it rules
us, as you see, a giant threatening our very existence. It
is from that we now flee and defend ourselves.”

Bullock listened to this in some dismay. His confidence
once shaken, he began to wonder if these people under-
stood the nature of the binary system they inhabited.
“ Your own sun must be approaching perihelion with the
monster,” he said diffidently. “ Every eight thousand years
they swing close and then part company again. Possibly
they have already passed their closest point and the crisis
is over.”

A harsh laugh came from Ehrlick. “You underesti-
mate us. Knowledge does not depend on size. Our astro-
nomical sciences were past that stage some twenty-six
thousand years ago.”

Bullock was duly abashed, and apologised.

“ I also must apologise,” Ehrlick said. “ We are upset
at present, or our civility would not so desert us. At each
recent successive perihelion. Bah alpha and beta have
drawn nearer, due to alpha’s own fast orbital revolution.
This of course is the usual order of things in a binary sys-
tem. The orbits of the stars intersect at two points, one
either side of perihelion. We have already passed the first
of these and are due at the second in ten days. We shall
then be in closest conjunction with alpha — a matter only
of a few hundred million miles.”

“ There cannot be a collision? ”

“ Natmally not. Nor do we fear one. But at that time
of closest conjunction, a matter of hours, Atumin will be
in a position between beta and aplha. Of course, it will
be many times nearer beta, its own sun, but that will be

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97

counteracted by the infinitely greater mass of alpha. A
gravitational tug of war will take place over our little
world.”

Bullock let silence cover his confusion. The process
sounded likely to be undergone in searing heat and that
he could not adjust with his foreknowledge of Atumin as
a world of snow and ice. Equally, the planet could not
be destroyed by the titanic forces, nor could it be wrenched
into an orbit about the other sun, for in his own time it
still circled beta.

“ I see you are bafified,” Ehrlick said, “ And under-
standably. So should we be, and our approaching fate
unknown, but for our development of time travel over the
last two years. We have thus learnt of the end of the
catastrophe, and you shall hear it. When those fatal hours,
minutes, near, our largest satellite, Lagg, chances by for-
time to move into opposition. It lies on the ecliptic. It
will be drawn away from us and take up a course round
alpha, but in those few minutes when dpha is eclipsed,
its hold on us will inevitably weaken and we shall swing
safely away after beta, on its predestined course.”

As Ehrlick talked, he had swung their craft away from
the city; now they were climbing and returning. The
massive shield over the city gleamed redly below, the un-
completed section looking from the air like a large chip
out of an inverted saucer.

“ Unfortunately, we shall be wrenched away into a
new orbit about Bah beta. At present we are at a mean
seventy million miles distant, but after the coming peri-
helion — in a fortnight’s time — we shall be something
approaching eight hundred and eighty million miles
away.” His voice lapsed into silence. His wife made the
next comment.

“ So you see our tragedy now. Professor Bullock. Atur-
nin will survive, but will become completely unliveable.
It will be so cold that the atmosphere will be partially
frozen down onto the face — as you have seen it in your
day. It is all too terrible to contemplate.”

Bullock saw. From capital of the First Galactic Empire
to — one of two hundred and seven Uninhabitable Worlds.
He felt crushed.

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Science Fantasy

Under Ehrlick’s control, the machine sank lower and
they touched down on the mighty roof. As they climbed
out, Ehrlick remarked, “ The privilege of coming up here
merely sight-seeing is one compensation for the responsi-
bility of being a Jat.”

He walked slowly away from them, sunk in thought,
and Galen said quietly, “ Our world has built up a great
tradition of civility, professor. Our laws are lenient — ^we
have no malcontents, no death sentence. I doubt if you’d
find half-a-dozen hand weapons in all Aturnin. We have
— graduated. But my husband has many responsibilities.
You see, he has chosen to stay here after perihelion.”

“ You mean — after the orbit change? ”

“ Someone in authority must stay. There must be no
disorder. Under this great roof, many will survive ...”

“ And you, Galen? ”

“ I stay with my husband.” She looked away, and then
pointed to the horizon, where light gathered behind a
wooded hill. “ There is our sun, see. This should be dawn,
with the cool mists clearing — would be, but for that
usurper up there.”

Beta came up, insignificant in the glare from alpha.
Bullock turned away, silent as the first beams slid over
the wide roof. His years in the ruins had been happy; he
had been reconstructing their glories in his mind. Now he
was wretched; here were the glories, and he saw them
merely as preludes to ruin. Abstractedly, he looked over
to where Ehrlick was talking to one of the roof construc-
tion crew. He saw the titanic nature of the job in hand.
It looked like a last fling. They had some marvellous
machines at work — ^there were two flying cranes that
appeared as airworthy as elephants. A great seventy foot
truck lumbered girders up from a small foundry con-
structed up here, and the foundry was a match box two
miles in the flat, steel distance.

Ehrlick rejoined them. “ Impressive, isn’t it? ” he
smiled at Bullock’s face. “ But we had ^tter be leaving.
It’ll get really hot up here soon. A pity that all this
construction will be partly vain ...”

“ Vain? ”

“ We have time travel. We know as well as you the

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99

way this shield will be almost everywhere ground down
onto the city by — ” he waved his hand, “ — this very air
we breathe now.”

“ I’m sorry I don’t understand. You build this shield,
knowing it will be a partial failure, to save the city. Yet
you — at least, most of you — are going to leave the city.
The two facts don’t match.”

They were climbing back in the crimson ’copter. As
the blades began to whirr, Ehrlick replied in a raised
voice, “Hardly anyone is leaving the city. Over the rest
of the planet, ships are taking off as many people as
possible to the other worlds of the Empire. But here, here
we are staying.” He laughed. “ And yet we are leaving
. . . We are going forward in time.”

The machine lifted, and they floated over the edge of
the shield. The land was a bright green below them. They
sank, and circled low over the high buildings, landing
neatly before the roimd white building, which Galen
referred to as the Civic Palace.

“ Are you tired of sight-seeing? ” she enquired.

He shook his head.

Once more Bullock stood in the great, decorated hall.
A queue of people still waited there. The doors of the
time chamber opened, and part of the crowd flled in. The
doors closed. A seven minutes’ pause, filled with the
muffled noise of the time device. The doors opened. The
chamber was empty. Another group of people moved in
and the doors closed again.

“ It is so simple,” Ehrlick said. “ Our whole population
drains off into the future.”

“ I see now,” Bullock said quickly. “ They go eight
thousand years ahead, don’t they? In eight thousand years,
beta and alpha are in conjimction again. And at the first
intersection of orbits — ”

“Yes, at first conjunction, the sims swing even closer
than this time. But Aturnin will be out of the way, round
the other side of Bah beta. The gravities of both suns will
be piled against it, and once more it will be wrenched
out of orbit. It will be drawn back into something very
near its present — its old orbit. Our world will come back
to life.”

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Science Fantaaf

The archaeologist nodded, mutely. At last he said, “ I
am one of the long-lived men from the border suns.
There’s a time effect out there on the edge of the galaxy
that gives us life-spans of three or even four centuries of
life. I have a long while to go yet. All I have ever lived
for is your world, Ehrlick. All the while I was digging in
your ruins, I knew I would survive to see that conjunc-
tion. I’m not an astronomer, but we have mechanical com-
puters, and I had worked that out for myself — I knew
Atumin would live again, and that was my desire. To
see the sun shine over the green ground once more.”

" Our people will also be there to see it.”

“ Now I know how far Pepkinson and I came back ia
time — eight thousand years, less the hundred and fifty.”

“ That must be corrert. You see our time chamber it
just a shuttle operating on a narrow band with an eight
thousand year limit. It goes back and forward all day.
Already in the future our people are building up again,
reconstructing.”

“ But it’s a great task, professor,” Galen added. “ And
your help is needed.”

“ If I can do anything at all ... ”

" You can, but before we talk of that, let us go home.
You must be tired, and Dorin and the Chief ^ntroller
will wonder what we have been doing.”

But when they returned, Dorin and the C.C. had gone.
* * * *

The evening had been a cheerful one. Ehrlick’s son,
Ehrmal, had returned home with friends and they had
talked with Bullock for a long while. Now both
suns had set and everyone retired to bed. Bullock had
been given a comfortable room and stood by it saying
good-night to his host.

“ I will return to my own time tomorrow, Ehrlick,” he
promised. “ I shall begin to organise help for you immed-
iately, without waiting for Pepkinson to turn up. He
would have been more influential than I — but I fear he
wotfld be disinclined to exert himself on behalf of others.”

“We shall regret your going, while remaining etern-
ally grateful for your eagerness, professor. As for your
friend, do not worry too much about him.”

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101

As Bullock paused enquiringly in the threshold, Ehrlick
added, “ As Jat, I am privy to certain secrets which must
not be communicated to others, but as you are not of
our time it would hardly be a breach to tell you some of
them, notably some paradoxes concerned with time travel.
‘ Foreknowledge of the future saps initiative.’ That is the
first maxim we have formulated in the last two years, the
period over which the time device has been perfected.
Another maxim, dependant on the other, is, ‘ All futures
are possible until Aey are past; and then they merely
remain probabilities.’ I will give you an example. The
time device may be likened to a rubber band slipped over
a nail, the nail representing — in our case — a point eight
thousand years ahead. The continuum is stretched back
like rubber, back to now. Obviously, each day that passes
stretches the rubber less, as ‘now’ moves closer to ‘then’ —
but the point at the other end remains constant. If you
from your time had gone forward instead of back to us,
you would have stretched the continuum very little — a
mere hundred and fifty years. You would have come out
where all our people come out, into a ruined civic palace
— where help from your world is already arriving. Medi-
cal aid, provisions, materials, they are flowing in al-
ready! ”

“ Then my help is not needed ! ” protested Bullock.

“ Yes. There you illustrate my point about foreknow-
ledge. The assistance is supplied because you or Pepkin-
son, we have not found out which, returned to prepare
your worlds for our appearance from the ice. But if
neither of you go, another future will eventually emerge.
You cannot do nothing, or the future of Prior Possibility
will be cancelled — and there are futures of infinite possi-
bility.”

He let his point sink in, then continued, “ That was how
we expected you, and had guards stationed in the cham-
ber waiting for you. Because on one of the lifts into the
future, Pepkinson and my daughter were seen there, in
the reviving Atumin.”

“ What? ”

“ He was noticed as an alien, Dorin was questioned,
and they were sent back.”

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Science Fantasy

“ When was this? ”

“ ‘When’ was two times. They were first eight thousand
years in our future, and they were returned to this even-
ing.”

“ Where are they now? I am afraid of Pepkinson.”

A frown crossed Ehrlick’s brow. “ And I am afraid of
Dorin. She was always irresponsible and selfish. Nobody
knows where they are now. We have few guards here,
but they have been on a search, without result.”

Bullock shook his head slowly. Forebodings overtook
him.

“ I must go back to my own time first thing tomorrow.
I shall make a full report on Pepkinson so as to nullify
any actions he may take.”

“ Don’t worry now, professor. Go to bed and sleep
well. Good-night.”

Bullock turned into his room, pressing the door slowly
shut, his brain puzzled. A revolver was dug into his
stomach, and a grim voice said, “ You’re coming with
me, Bullock.” It took him a frightened moment to recog-
nise the steely tones for Pepkinson’s.

“ What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.

“ I’ve been standing here listening to a very interesting
little conversation, all about goody-goody Bullock. If you
shout. I’ll shoot you at once, and then Ehrlick will never
get any aid.”

“ Don’t be a fool, what’s suddenly made you so dan-
gerous? ”

“ For one thing, I haven’t swallowed the line of tackle
that you seem to have done from these Atumians. They’re
a powerful race, and you’re helping them to power again.
For another thing, Dorin and I get on very well together;
we’re both interested in matters like self-improvement, I
find. But two things I can’t do. I can’t understand enough
of her language, and I can’t manage their confounded
time device, being constitutionally unmechanical. You
can help in both cases, Bullock. Come on out the win-
dow. Dorin’s waiting in a car outside. She’s longing to
see you again. Come on, move man.”

Bullock was helpless. He was not a hero, his bravery
lay in facing intangibles, and the idea of jumping a gim

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103

never occurred to him — he had two hundred years of
life to lose. He climbed dumbly out onto the dim lawn
and was pushed through a small plantation onto a side
road, where Dorin awaited them at the wheel of a power-
ful car. The archaeologist was thrust into the back seat.
Pepkinson jumped in beside him and they moved off.

“ You’re just an amateur kidnapper,” Bullock snapped.

“ Maybe. But the ransom is — a city. Now listen to me.
During the siesta hour this afternoon, the Civic Palace
was deserted and Dorin and I got into the time device. I
tried to get her back into my world with me, but when
I swimg the lever over, we just materialised into the point
where Aturnin was coming to life again.”

“ What was it like? ”

“ Exceedingly busy and messy, but I’m not here to give
you a travelogue. The point is, we got sent back and have
been hiding ever since. Now the time device is again
deserted and we are going to try again, with your help.”

“ I’m going back in the morning. Isn’t that soon
enough? ”

“ Sorry to spoil your night’s sleep, but no. If these
people can see into the future they may already have
spotted that I have — am going to do a little sabotage.
They wouldn’t tell you if they had.”

Dorin called something to him, Pepkinson gave a brief
word of agreement and the car stopped.

“ You are mad Pepkinson. Whatever can you gain by
all this? ”

“ Gain? Everything . . . I’m going back to the C.U.W.
on Deneb VI to get hold of the biggest excavation detail
ever. Then I’m coming back with it to Aturnin, to plun-
der it in the name of science. When these people crawl
out of their burrows again, they’ll find the place picked
clean! ”

“You greedy fool! You dirty, grasping cur! How on
earth did you get Dorin to comply with a rogue’s dream
like that.”

“ Ha, you don’t imagine I’ve given her all the details,
do you? She thinks she’s in for a nice, safe life on Deneb
VI and so she is, too! ”

“Dorin, this devil — Aaah! ” His plea to the girl was

104 Science Fantasy

stopped by a swift blow to the solar plexus. Pepkinson
grabbed him by the throat.

“ Don’t be stupid, Bullock. You can’t stop me. If you
think I’m going to tolerate for ever the stuffy boredom
of an obsolete and powerless post just to oblige your pal
Ehrlick, you’re wrong. I’m desperate. Now, tell me, tell
me quicldy, how do I work that time device to get back
to the time we came from? ”

“ I can’t tell you.”

“ Tell me, or I swear I’ll shoot you dead.”

“Well . . . You move the lever over to the left, all
but about a minute and a half of the total arc.”

“ It’s no use talking to me about arcs. I’m a Controller
not a mathematician. How far over in inches? ”

“ Just over six inches.”

“ All right. I hate to break it to you, but that’s all you
are needed for. Dorin, come and help me tie him up.”

Bullock was hauled unceremoniusly out of the car. He
saw in the dimness that they were parked by one of the
ornamental pools before the Civic Palace. Nobody was
about, taking advantage of the brief dark, and he re-
gretted that the Atumians were so peaceable that they
did not bother with guards. He was securely trussed in
two minutes. Dorin came towards him, sprinkling liquid
from a bottle onto a cloth. “ Now you sleep,” she said
in English.

“ Wouldn’t it be better if we pushed him into this
water? ” Pepkinson asked her, with appropriate gestures
to the pool. “ It would save any further trouble.”

She said in a shocked voice, “ No. No kill ! ”

“As you please. As soon as my squads get digging,
we’ll have the time device dismantled; that will stop any
bother. You’re going out now, professor. Here’s a thought
to take with you in your dreams — ^this gun wasn’t loaded.
I fired off all my rounds at that creature in the ruins.
Look! ”

He threw his weapon out into the dark. As it splashed
into the pool, the cloth was clamped firmly over Bullock’s
face. Helpless, the archaeologist gasped in bitter fumes.

Blackout.

Unauthorised Persons

105

The Chief Controller was in a fury. For the third
time, he moved the major lever over. For the third time,
he kicked the activator pedal. For the third time, they
were drowned in a crescendo of noise and for the third
time he opened the door and they stepped out into a dark
and ruined city. He was up against a problem of size. The
lever’s swing was almost six feet over the uncalibrated
scale, representing the maximum journey of eight thous-
and years. Had he been less thick and hot headed, he
might have calculated for himself that one and a third
inches roughly represented his required century and a
half. Instead, he worked on the trial and error scheme,
moving the lever slowly on for each journey. Besides,
Bullock had said six inches and it never occurred to him
the professor might have lied imder duress.

“ Let’s hope we are there this time ! ” he exclaimed.
He shone his torch out into the silence. The city looked
forbidding and chill.

“ Come on ! ” he said to Dorin.

They hurried out into the ghostly square and made
for the shops. The route was the same always, the litter
the same always. Up the narrow shopping street, a fur-
tive movement in the buildings on their right. Of course
the place was haunted; its inhabitants lived on. Pepkinson
shivered. The torch was waning and his nerve sank with
it. This was their third foray . . . They had to go each
time to see if his tunnel was there, the tunnel he had
accidentally blown in the pile of rubble. If it was, they
could crawl through into the record factory and along to
Bullock’s shaft. If not, they came back.

Not. Wrong again. An unscalable pile of rubble stood
in their path. He kicked a stone in frustration. There was
nothing for it but to go back and move the lever along
again. If he had but known it, they were stiU about a
century before the day Bullock was landed on Atumin.
Wearily, they retraced their steps.

At Ae end of the street, something attracted Dorin’s
downcast eyes. “ Look ! ” she screamed.

Across the square, the Civic Palace loomed. In the hall,
a fire glowed, and a figure stood over it, dimly seen
against the door of the time device. As Dorin’s scream

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Science Fantasy

rang out, it vanished and they saw it no longer. For a
long time, Pepkinson and the girl stood petrified, waiting.
Nothing happened. The fire burned steadily ahead.

“ We must pass it,” Pepkinson said. “ It’s the only way
back.”

Half dragging the girl, he went forward and eventually
clmbed the steps of the palace. There was not a sign of
anyone. Seizing up a board as a weapon, he stepped boldly
past the fire — they both regarded it as something super-
natural — and up to the tall door. Nothing moved. Giving
a sigh of relief, Pepkinson put down the board and tried
to lass Dorin. She flinched away, and in a burst of fear
pushed into the time device. With a similar surge of panic,
he followed and swung over the lever, shooting them
into safety.

This was a mistake on Pepkinson’s part. He had been
working the lever carefully along the scale about a half
inch at a time. Now he lost his place, and had to put the
lever back by guesswork. Again they grated through the
time barrier. He opened the door. Again a dark, fearful
Atumin greeted them.

“ Come on,” he said to Dorin.

“ I not come on.”

“ You must. I take you home.”

“ You go on. See if this time right. Then come get me.”

Her face was pale and pleading. She was tired. She
was also, it dawned through his thick head, growing sick
at the sight of her dead city. He too, was losing heart.

“ All right Dorin, You stay here. I won’t be long.”

“ No. Please. Leave me torch ! ”

“ Not on your life ! Wait. I’ll build you a beacon.”

He hunted across the desolate square, grumbling at his
loss of time and pulling pieces of wood out of the ruins
of a tall building. Carrying them back in his arms, he
dumped them in the middle of the entrance hall and lit
them, fanning up the flames with his hand.

“ I won’t be long,” he said curtly, and made off into
the dark with his torch. Dorin began to seem like a help-
less child, and Pepkinson was not fond of children at the
best of times.

He picked his way gloomily along the now-familiar

Unauthorised Persons

107

street, and suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. Some-
thing was approaching. Hurriedly, he switched off his
torch and cowered in a doorway. A light moved ahead,
towards him. He made an effort to run, but a spasm of
supernatural fear held him motionless. Two figures
neared, silent and worried of aspect. Then Pepkinson
nearly dropped — he recognised them, himself and Dorin!

The discovery only increased his fear. He crouched
and watched, his hands shaking. The explanation occurred
to him readily enough; he had returned after their hasty
retreat, to almost exactly the same place in time as their
last investigation, but about five minutes later. No com-
fort came to him from this knowledge, as he watched
himself out there, gliding by with the torchlight shining
glassily in his eyes. That thing was not him. It had been
once, perhaps but now it was only — a ghost from the past.
The two stalked by his hiding place, and he gathered his
wits together.

A scream rang among the dead buildings. It made
Pepkinson’s flesh crawl even as he realised he should have
anticipated it. Dorin was screaming at the sight of her own
fire. Coming out into the street again, he watched two
frightened figures stare across the square, and began to
laugh soundlessly and mirthlessly. Let them worry!
They’d get over it. Meanwhile, no sense in going to look
for the vital tunnel — the ghosts told him it was not there.
He returned slowly, emerging into the open in time to
see his earlier self disappear into the time device.

Dorin was crouching under the grand staircase, tremb-
ling.

“ We are the haunters of this city,” she said. “ I could
not face myself. Now I shall always be afraid of myself.”

He laughed, suddenly light-hearted. “ If we have only
ourselves to fear, we should win through! Look here.
I’ll make a notice out, just to keep ourselves off in case
we are any more bother to us.” He spoke as one humour-
ing a child, and seized a board lying nearby. For an
instant, his hand hovered about it blankly — he so seldom
wrote — and then the world of Hampden Poyle and the
CUW came flooding back, and he recalled his official
phraseology.

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Science Fantasy

He wrote on the board:

UNAUTHORISED PERSONS ARE WARNED

THAT TO PROCEED PAST THIS POINT IN

SPACE OR TIME MAY RENDER THEM

EXCEEDINGLY LIABLE TO PAINFUL

HUMILIATION EVEN DEATH.

P. P. Pepkinson.

Chief Controller, U.W.

Somehow, the sight of such a prosaic notice soothed
their nerves.

“ We must hurry if we are to get to your world before
it is morning in mine,” Dorin said. So once more they
went into the device, moved the lever along a space,
activated it . . . and stepped again into the unchanging
gloom of the wrecked city. The fire that had blazed — it
seemed a minute ago — was ashes under their feet, ashes
collapsed under dust. The notice still stood where they
had left it; how old was the lettering now? It must
already have stood a hundred years.

“ Are you coming? ” Pepkinson asked the girl.

She shook her head. “ I stay by the door here ” she
said.

“ It makes so much delay getting a fire,” he grumbled
“ Come with me.”

“ A fire doesn’t matter. You go. I stay by the door.”

“ As you please, Dorin. I won’t be long.”

He set off again, down the wide steps and across the
open towards the street of shops. His torch was growing
dim, and shadows crept nearer about him. Then, behind
him, he heard the roar of the time device. With a cry, he
turned and ran back, hurling himself into the great hall.
Dorin was gone. The door of the time chamber was
locked. All his frenzied, terrified hammering could not
move it.

For over an hour he stood and paced by the great
door, using his torch only at brief intervals to husband its
light. His numbed mind refused to believe the truth: he
was shut out. At length, from sheer weariness, he sat
down with his back against the door, and fell asleep. His
waking was sudden and filled with a desperate compre-
hension of the situation. Unless it was now the time of

Unauthorised Persons

109

his and Bullock’s first penetration of this part of Aturnin,
he was trapped in the city.

A long while passed before he had the courage to make
the test. At last he got up and dragged once more up the
hated street. The mountainous pile of rubble once more
met his shrinking gaze. He was due to stay. With a cry,
he flung himself down and commenced to scrape away
the bricks. As a few were dislodged, more trickled down
the slope which reached up to the low roof, and his efforts
remained useless. Pepkinson was still grovelling when the
torch failed.

Life is determination; where there is the possibility of
survival, it survives. The great city lay silent under its
ice layers, waiting pillage or resurrection. Its cellars and
larders were well stocked with tinned and boxed pro-
visions. Its shops were filled with provisions. But as the
hungry man prowled from place to place, the mirage of
food crumbled before him, dropping into rust or wet
pulp. Life is determination; it preys on life to live.
Pepkinson was not the only creature there in the dark
mazes of the city. Giant white animals with wet lips
hunted and bred in a thousand forsaken rooms and
cellars, rodent-like animals as large as spaniels and savage
as sharks. But they feared light and could be trapped.
They could also be cooked and eaten. Life is determina-
tion; hence — it survives.

Bullock shook his head. It seemed unaccountably loose.
He muttered, and tried to fan away the mists that fogged
his brain. Someone was making him walk, or rather
stagger. He opened his heavy eyes. A woman was pro-
pelling him up some steps. It was Dorin. Then his
memory returned.

“ Please hurry,” she said. “ It grows light already and
shortly guards will be here and the citizens will start
queueing. We cannot seem to strike your time. I am sure
the Chief Controller is working the wrong way. If you
will get us quickly back there, we will let you go free. He
is so stubborn and I am sure that all that is required is a
simple arithmetical calculation — ^you understand.”

“ Where is Pepkinson? ”

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Science Fantasy

“ I suddenly had the notion of fetching you, and I left
him — ahead in time. Look, I marked the place on the
scale with the end of a burnt stick, so that we could go
straight back and pick him up.”

She smiled at her bright idea, paced about anxiously
behind him as he moved the lever over from the ‘Now’ end
to the black mark at the other, left, end. Bullock was him-
self again, more than himself, filled with an iron decision.
Pepkinson had to be eliminated. It was unlucky — although
not for Bullock — that he placed the lever so that Dorin’s
mark was on its right, rather than on its left as it should
have been. A small matter, but it made a difference of
nine years to Pepkinson.

The time barrier rumbled noisily about them, and Dorin
hurriedly pushed open the great door. Blackness. Bullock
cast round for something to light. Pepkinson’s notice stood
near; it was backed with a pitchy substance that should
burn well. He broke off a long strip, taking care that the
hated signature came off with it. Ever3where, that name
should be obliterated. He had also snapped off the last
word of the text: DEATH. Very suitable, Bullock
thought, as the flames bit into it. He lifted it above his
head and motioned to Dorin to follow him.

As they emerged again into the great tomb, Bullock
cast a brief look about. He saw now the largeness, the
valiance of Atumin’s plan for the survival of its chief city.
When the roof was being constructed, it was already known
it would collapse, yet still work had gone ahead, and
wisely, for although it had been weighed almost to the
groimd in many places, here at the city centre it still
stood firm above them. Rebuilding would not be too
formidable a work — if the Atumians were given their
chance. And Pepkinson was all that stood in their way.

They halted on the steps and began shouting. That
should be safe enough. There were no weapons in the
ruins for Pepkinson to pick up, and if Bullock started a
search down the streets he might meet an ambush. No
answer greeted them, only echoes. The rough torch
guttered dimly.

“You’d better — ” Bullock began, and in that instant
two great white creatures launched themselves at him.

Unauthorised Persons

111

and Dorin. He went down with an angry, stinking face
glaring into his own. Dorin cried with pain. Struggling,
Bullock brought up his feeble torch and rammed it into
the furry muzzle that sought his throat. The creature
yelped, pawed wildly, and bounded off into the dark.
Pulling himself up, Bullock brought the wood down
savagely on the other brute’s skull. It leapt up, striking
at him, and dragged itself off after its mate.

Bending tenderly over Ehrlick’s daughter, Bullock
lifted her head. In the dim glow, he saw what he had
feared — Dorin’s windpipe had been chewed through. She
was dead.

He stood up and squared his shoulders. With angry,
lashing movements, he fanned flame back to his torch.
Then he began towards the dim buildings. At the first
one he came to, he paused, and broke in the door with
a few kicks. He entered, peering through the musty, ill-
smelling atmosphere. He wanted a weapon. In the back
room, a table lay collapsed on the floor; termites had
long ago eaten through its legs. The man kicked at the
drawer and it fell away, spilling rot and termites over
the floor. A miscellaneous collection of cutlery was
revealed. Among it lay a heavy chopping knife. Bullock
picked it up and pushed his way back into the street, his
knuckles white roimd the handle.

Among the shadows his light moved, a flickering beacon
glowing as if afraid of the darkness it dispelled. Bullock
staggered as he walked, his eyes gleaming crimson in the
smoky illumination. He called every now and again the
one word “ Pepkinson.” On either side of him yawned
black doorways that filled with menacing silhouettes as
he passed. He was tense, prepared — yet even so he was
taken by surprise. Suddenly from a narrow doorway a
figure leaped, a shaggy, rag-clad figure who had lurked
for nine years here, eventually forgetting the purpose
for which it had come. It was filled only with the feral
will to survive.

Even as it struck, the man with the torch screamed and
screamed unnerved by the terror of finding life where
only dead centuries should be. His torch fell to the floor
with him and lay guttering there as its owner was dragged

112

Science Fantasy

into a side chamber and propped against a wall. Suddenly
alarmed by the enfolding echoes, the ragged attacker
grabbed up the still-burning torch and raced back along
the way his victim had come. Across the square he ran,
springing over the body, into the civic hall, into the time
device. The great door closed behind him. Darkness
resumed its reign. The dust settled again.

A distant rumble like thimder. Bullock stirred. He had
lain for a long while in a semi-stupor, imagining himself
in his grave. Visions floated before him, glimpses of his
home planet, glimpses of Ehrlick’s world, which appeared
sometimes as a fine and glittering domain, sometimes as
a broken shell. Now he gathered his wits. He was alive,,
but entombed. He had sprawled here — how long? He
imagined it to be days.

Now there were sotinds outside this unknown place
where he lay, and numbly he imagined the white creatures
gathering to attack. Probably as the years had seeped by,
their food had grown scarcer and they more bold. He sat
up. Footsteps approached.

Voices were talking in English. He heard his own
name. A light grew. Two men passed along the thorough-
fare within feet of him, and their light washed for an
instant over one of his shoes. Blood rushed to his face as
he realised — he knew those voices, he knew those men.
One was himself. One was Chief Controller Pepkinson.
They were making their first visit to the Civic Palace.

With a groan, he tried to get up. If he could stop
them . . . His left leg was dead where he had been
lying on it. Painfully he rose, and dragged himself into
the street. The two figures were several yards away,
crossing the desolate square. No, he would not deal with
them. What must be, must be — and now there was
another way.

He turned back, making for his own quarters, climb-
ing wearily through the tunnel Pepkinson had just un-
covered, riding back to the cage, locking those steel doors,
sailing up towards the surface . . . towards the splendour
that still lay a hundred and fifty years ahead, the splen-
dour and the reckoning.

—JOHN RUNCIMAN

113

There might even have been a news story in
Einstein s discovery of Relativity — just a
small one. Not front-page stuff.

MATCHBOX

by Peter

Now look, son. You will notice I’m keeping my temper.
When you’ve been in journalism a few weeks you will
realise that News Editors never keep their tempers. I’m
doing you a favour, trying to help you. I know you’ve
come a long way to take this job and your head is full of
School of Journalism stuff and you think cub reporters
^)end their time making dazzling scoops. Well they don’t.
They spend their time covering weddings and police courts
and amateur dramatics if they’re lucky and local council
meetings if they’re not. That is what the readers want.
That is what we print. And believe me, if the Great
Venusian Lizard materialised at a society wedding in this
place, the readers would still want to know what the bride
was wearing. That’s what matters. That’s what sells
papers. Scoops — phooey. Listen, I’ll tell you a story.

I wasn’t much older than you, I suppose, and just as
innocent. Well, perhaps not quite as innocent . . . any-
way, there was this Women’s Institute meeting and me
sitting balancing a cup of lovely strong tea and a piece
of pink iced cake and not bored any more, suddeiJy. I
remember wishing the tea was something even stronger,
wishing the Vice-chairman or whatever would leave off
yakking, wondering how soon I could decently drift over
to Mrs. O’Neill and start pumping her. For diere had to
be a story in this — maybe I even used the word “ scoop ”
to myself. Meanwhile I just watched the expressions on

114

Science Fantasy

the faces of the women, which I must say were a treat.
They ranged through mild surprise, jaw-dropped incredu-
lity and frank suspicion to open, naked hatred.

For a while I really thought there might be an ugly
scene and if you think a lot of middle-aged women can’t
be dangerous you should wait outside a court-room when
they’re bringing in a sex-maniac who’s done something
horrible to a child. Anyway, there wasn’t a scene; W.I.
members aren’t quite the level of the tricoteuses round
the guillotine in ancient France. Maybe my presence kept
them in line a bit — ^the power of the Press, my boy, it
works in odd ways sometimes.

For a while the women went on making sinister sort
of buzzings and murmurings then the Vice-chairman
(Mrs. J. G. de V. Bracegirdle, acting for the Chairman,
who, we regret to say, is indisposed etc.) got up on her
feet, gave a funny sort of uncertain smile as though she
wasn’t quite sure whether anyone was going to listen, and
spoke.

“ Well, I don’t think there is any doubt that Mrs.
O’Neill is the winner of our little competition with —
how many was it my dear? — five hundred and sixty
something? — objects in a matchbox.”

The undoubted winner, not very far from tears,
started to say softly: “There are still one or two more
things in my box, Mrs. Bracegirdle, if you’d like to — ”

She was firmly silenced by the vice-chairman, who
continued : “ Mrs. Mettrick comes second, with seventy
six, and Mrs. Ridley and Mrs. German tie for third
place with seventy one objects each.” There was luke-
warm applause, and the secretary jotted something down
in her IMe book. So, more unobtrusively, did I.

I had come along to give the members of East and
West Hambling Women’s Institute a very interesting talk
about weekly newspapers. Last month they had heard a
very interesting talk about Victorian jewellery, and at
next month’s meeting they would no doubt be having
a very interesting talk by a policewoman or a representa-
tive of a cosmetics firm. But this month they had wanted
to know about newspapers, and I had told them what
they wanted to hear.

Matchbox

115

Not the inside story of the weekly miracle by which the
miscellaneous events of a county’s history are assembled
into a threepeimy broadsheet. It is better that life should
retain some of its mysteries, and anyway, it’s a dreary
process to have to describe.

So instead I gave them a series of anecdotes drawn
from my own not very chequered career in provincial
journalism. You know the sort of thing : “ In our last
issue we described Col. Smythe-Smythe as a battle-
scared hero. This should of coiu^ have read bottle-
scarred.” And — weighing up my audience carefully — a
couple of slightly risqu6 ones about a junior with a taste
for long words who began a wedding report by saying
that the marriage was quietly consummated at the Parish
Church of so-and-so, and a village correspondent who
reported a whist drive in aid of the National Society for
the Prevention of Children . . . These stories went down
very well, but I reflected that I had better leave them
out of my talk to the Mothers’ Union in a fortnight’s
time. The Mothers, no doubt fed up to the teeth with
marriage and motherhood, have adopted this attitude of
treating these matters as sacred: a typical British com-
promise for dealing with unpleasant necessities.

The meeting drew towards its close. The competitions
secretary was handing out bulbs for the forthcoming
daffodil competition. ‘ Ah, the pleasures of the rustic life,’
I thought to myself as I worked my way round towards
Mrs. O’Neill. It wasn’t difficult. Nobody else seemed to
want to talk to her.

She was a pleasant-looking little woman of about
thirty-five, with tweeds, sandy hair and spectacles. She
looked as though she ought to be talkative, so I started
chatting about the village, the weather, the meeting, the
matchbox competition. Especially the matchbox compe-
tition.

“ I couldn’t see very well from where I was sitting.
But it seemed a pretty impressive performance to get
all those things into a matchbox. What were the objects?
Mustard seeds? ”

She gave a litde, half-unhappy, sort of smile, wonder-
ing whether I too was going to be nasty to her. “ Oh no.

116

SciMce Fantatf

There’s a rule that you can’t have more than one of any
kind of object. I think all these ladies thought I waa
cheating, anyway. But I wasn’t — really I wasn’t. I did get
all those things in my matchbox.

“ It was very hard to think of new objects, too, after
the first two hundred or so.”

I believed her, and sympathised. But now we were
getting to the point.

“Well, I can’t see what all the fuss was about. You
stood there, in full view of everybody, and took your
five hundred and odd objects out of your matchbox.
Where is it, by the way? I’d certainly like to see it.”

Mrs. O’Neill rummaged in her rather bulky handbag.
It had to be bulky to accommodate all the paraphemaik
that emerged from it — ^pins, buttons, tiny coins, tinier
nuts and bolts and odds and ends that might have come
from smashed watches and transistor radios. Finally
she produced it, this pocket Caligari’s cabinet. Just an
ordinary matchbox. Not even one of the smoker’s-sizc
matchboxes.

I suppose at that stage I still thought it was all a clever
bit of legerdemain, but tricks fascinate me and I had
to see this one done.

“Now put them all back in the box,” I demanded.

She looked at me like a small boy whose favourite
imcle has just snatched away his lollipop.

“. . . please,” I added, with what has always served
me as a disarming smile. “ I do believe you. It's just that
—oh well, let me help you.”

Together we started sorting and grading her collec-
tion of objects, dropping larger ones in the corners of the
cardboard tray and packing them round with smaller
ones. After four or five minutes it became obvious that
we were not doing too well, and Mrs. O’Neill’s fellow
members — ^those who had not already left — were begin-
ning to give us some rather curious looks.

Mrs. O’Neill herself was begining to flash distress sig-
nals, so I dropped the already full box into her bag, swept
in the remaining heap of objects with my cuff, a^
pushed the bag into her hands.

“ Let me give you a lift home,” I offered. This whole

Matchbox

117

affair had set my curiosity seething. It was a silly, nagging
business, but trivial as it was I knew I would not sleep
properly until I knew how the trick had been done.

More distress signals. Accept a ride from a strange
man? Lurid pictures of white-slave traffic, or stocking-
strangled bodies in ditches.

But good sense won the day, and ignoring the now
even more curious glances of her colleagues Mrs. O’Neill
and I walked out to the car. It wasn’t far to her house,
only a mile or so, which didn’t give me much time to
invent an excuse for getting myself asked inside to see
the rest of the matchbox trick.

My passenger, however, was made of more reckless
sniff than I had given her credit for, and as we drew up
outside her gate she asked me in for coffee.

“ Goodness knows what the neighbours will think,” she
said with an uneasy little giggle. “ Anyway, after that
episode tonight I’m not sure that I value their opinion
as much as I used to.”

I wondered what she was worrying about. There had
to be a Mr. O’Neill in the house, after all; a little pink
chubby man with spectacles, who tinkered about with
clocks or fussed over prize dahlias. (It wasn’t imtil later
that I discovered that all that was left of Mr. O’Neill in
the house was an old trunk of belongings that he hadn’t
been able to take with him when he’d fled to South
America with his company’s funds. It was unlikely he’d
come back for it now, because the discreet little plane
he’d chartered had disappeared somewhere over the Gulf
of Mexico. There was no end to the surprises of the even-
ing-)

Over coffee we reopened, by mutual consent, the subject
of the matchbox.

“ Just take your time, and think carefully,” I told her.
“ How did you do it the first time? I mean I suppose you
used up all the familiar objects you could lay your
hands on first of all, and then hunted out all these
other things later.”

The “ other things ” turned out to have been salvaged
from her late husband’s old tin trunk. I had been right
about the clocks, if nothing else. Never trust a man

118

Science Fantasy

with a hobby.

Three hours and several pots of coffee later it became
clear that, give or take a dozen articles or so, Mrs. O’Neill
was going to repeat her performance. We almost danced
in the little drawing room. Triumphantly she slid the
tray into its receptacle, and tossed the matchbox in the
air in sheer exuberance. I caught it, almost as gleefully.

There was something wrong.

For a minute or so I stood holding the box with its
neatly packed contents, trying to discover what was
worrying me. Then I remembered picking up Mrs.
O’Neill’s handbag in the Institute hall and handing it,
weighty with jingling junk, back to her.

The box I held in my hand wasn’t anything like as
heavy as it should have been.

The same thought evidently occurred to Mrs. O’Neill
at the same time. Without a word she took the box
from my hand and disappeared into the kitchen, to
emerge a few seconds later with a pair of scales. She
put the matchbox in the pan, and the pointer flickered
over to the two-oimce mark.

Still silent, she opened the matchbox, replaced it on
the scales, and brought a pair of tweezers. Delicately,
one at a time, she lifted the objects out of the tray
and put them on the scales beside the matchbox. My
flesh fairly crawled as I watched the ne^e slowly
creeping up to nine ounces.

For a long minute neither of us spoke. We just stood
there, white-faced, wondering what on earth we could
have done.

“ Perhaps ” Mrs. O’Neill’s voice squeaked as she
spoke, and she tried again. “ Perhaps what we have is
some sort of four dimensional mat^box.”

The world needs its Mrs. O’Neills, I thought, people
who are not ashamed to stand right up and state tl
obvious, however squeakily.

“Let’s see now, I fancy I’ve heard something about
such an object.” A newspaperman’s memory is a glory-
hole of useless information, odd disconnected scraps of
of knowledge whittled like bacon rind from the good
meat of a lifetime’s news stories. I had acquired this

Matchbox

119

particular item from a mathematician who wanted to
ride his hobby horse — ^topology — when I had gone to
consult him about statistics for a feature I was writing
on insurance.

“ A fom-dimensional cube, or hypercube, or” — I groped
in my mental lumber room — “tesseract (I think) is not
strictly speaking a cube at all, any more than a line is
a plane.”

She looked perplexed.

“ Think of it like this. You start with a point — think
back to your schooldays and geometry lessons, and
remember that a point has neither length, breadth nor
thickness. It has only position.

“ Next think of a one-dimensional object : a line,
which has only length, no breadth or thickness. Now
a line connects two points.

“ Move up to two dimensions, and you come to a
plane, which is circumscribed by four lines, and inci-
dentally has four points — one at each corner.

“ From a two-dimensional plane we move to a three-
dimensional object, in its simplest form a cube.”

“ I should have thought a sphere was the simplest,”
said Mrs. O’Neill. She had me there, so I pretended
not to have heard. All I know about circles and spherical
geometry and such things is a mnemonic for remember-
ing the first fourteen decimal places of pi.

“ Now our three-dimensional cube has six two-
dimensional faces or planes,” I continued. “ You can
see a sort of pattern emerging. A line has two points,
a plane has four lines, a cube has six planes, and our
hypercube has eight ordinary cubes arranged around it.”

I didn’t know whether this reasoning was at all sound,
but this was the early hours of the morning, the time
for evolving brave new theories. I sounded so convinc-
ing that I would have addressed the Royal Society on
the subject with not a moment’s hesitation.

“ If it makes it any easier to conceive, the eight
cubes would be so arranged as to show” (a moment’s
thought) “ sixteen points.”

More theorising, but it convinced both of us. In any
case, it hardly affected our immediate concern, the

120 Science Fantasy

enigmatic matchbox that still lay, with its nine ounces
of erstwhile contents, on the scale pan.

Another few moments’ silence, and Mrs. O’Neill
came to the rescue once again by asking the necessary
question.

“ Where do we go from here? ”

She then provided an answer of sorts by going into
the kitchen and making more coffee, thus giving me
time to think up a more lasting solution. The first step,
I thought, would be to discover just what we had, and
how we could use it. I wondered about patenting the
box, for there had to be some money to be made out
of it somehow. But then I recalled something about the
scope of patents, and I had a distant recollection of
having heard that you can’t patent a fundamental
principle of science: letters patent (a distant voice in
my memory seemed to be saying) are only granted in
respect of artifacts which could be constructed or pro-
cesses which could be carried out by someone skilled
in the appropriate field when given appropriate instruc-
tions.

And anyway, who could possibly be interested in buy-
ing a matchbox, or any other container for that matter,
which would hold eight times as much as it appeared to
hold? Only conjurers or smugglers, I thought. No money
to be made there, unless we took up smuggling on our
own account.

Perhaps the manufacturers of matches would be inter-
ested, I thought wryly, if only to avoid accidentally making
four-d matchboxes and putting themselves out of business
by selling four hundred matches for the price of fifty.

This was the point at which I began to realise some-
thing that should have been obvious from the start.

The matchbox did not have remarkable properties of
its own. If it had, then it must have had far too many
matches in when Mrs. O’Neill bought it, and she would
have noticed, if only because the sandpaper would have
worn out while the box still appeared to be full. I con-
gratulated myself on this piece of deduction, and then
realised that it was unnecessary anyway. If the box had
been a hyperbox from the beginning, then Mrs. O’Neill

Matchbox

121

would not have had any trouble earlier in the evening
putting the objects back.

Ergo, she must have opened up a fourth dimension, so
to speak, because of the particular combination of objects
she had chosen. Or more probably the combination of a
certain set of the objects.

Clearly, it was time for more experiments, and I said
so to Mis. O’Neill as she brought in the coffee. I hoped
she would be able to remember again the order in which
she had packed her matchbox. On reflection, I realised
that the critical objects had to be in the first seventy or
eighty objects, this being the number you would ordinarily
expect to be able to cram into the bax. This narrowed
down our field of search substantially.

It was beginning to come light a few hours later, but
by that time we had eliminated all but thirty tiny,
random-looking articles. They included a pin, a hairgrip,
a needle, several watch components including a small
luminous dial (the figures painted with a radioactive com-
pound?), a ball-bearing, a match and grain of rice. Once
these were in the tray of the matchbox, we foimd we were
able to stuff a large pocket handkerchief in and still be
able to slide the tray back into its cover.

It still left a lot of questions unanswered. Why, when
the handkerchief was withdrawn, was it possible to see the
original objects, lying-apparently in a perfectly common-
place manner — on the bottom of the tray? W% did they
not stay in one of the fourth-dimensional projections of
the box, into which they had presumably been pushed by
the entry of the handkerchief? Particularly puzzling was
the matter of weight, for if the objects were drawn back
into the visible matchbox by the action of gravity, it
seemed reasonable to suppose that this was because they
were susceptible to gravity — and ought therefore to regis-
ter their weight when the packed box was put on the
scales.

But day was growing brighter, and intellectual brilliance
seemed to recede with the darkness, for no answers to
these questions seemed forthcoming. We had come at last
to the end of our resources in the matter. Clearly what
was needed now was the expert approach.

122

Science Fantasy

I left, having persuaded Mrs. O’Neill to let me have
the matchbox and its vital contents, and exchanged a not
very subtle pleasantry with the milkman as I let myself
into my lodgings. I awoke a couple of hours later feeling
as fresh as if I’d just had a couple of hours sleep, and
made my way to the oflSce.

Harvey, my news editor, glanced up at me as I entered.
His glance evidently took in my all-night eyes and un-
shaven (no, if I must be scrupulously honest, even un-
washed) features for after looWng at the Diary for the
previous day, he started to warn me against the perils
of being drawn into Women’s Institute orgies.

“ You mark my words. Sock,” he said (Sock is short
for Socrates. How I got this nickname is a long and not
very interesting story.)

“I’ve seen it happen too often. These harpies out in
the county drag you into their midst, load you up with
rhubarb wine, and before you know where you are you’re
passing round mystery parcels and taking part in other
obscene rituals, and . . .”

It went on for several minutes more. Our Mr. Harvey
was noted for his ingenious improvisations on original
themes, and this morning he was in good voice. He con-
cluded by asking me what I had got out of my night’s
work.

“ The news story of the decade,” I answered. I should
probably have said something of the sort whatever the
circumstances. But just to emphasise the point I solemnly
drew the matchbox out of my pocket, and whispered con-
spiratorially : “ It’s all in here.”

“ Have it on my desk first thing this afternoon, then,
and if you can keep it down to half a column or so, so
much the better. Remember we have the education esti-
mates this week.”

His bellows of laughter drifted down the corridor after
me as I set off on my first Diary job of the day, which
would take me to the local magistrates’ court.

I had about forty minutes to spare before the beaks
started dishing out the fines for being-in-charge-of-a-
bicycle-without-proper-rear-lights so I utilised it by
dropping in on my mathematical friend, who lived close

Matchbox

123

by.

“ Hello, Mr. Meinetz, I hope I don’t disturb you?”

“ Oh. Hello. Simpson, isn’t it? From the Gazette?
You’re on the job early this morning. I’m still breakfast-
ing. But come in. Help yourself to some coffee.”

I winced, feeling that I had been living on the stuff
for decades, but I had some nonetheless. Three hours of
magistrates court stretched before me and the battle with
sleep was likely to be intense.

“ Well, what can I do for you this time? More statis-
tics?”

“Well no, as a matter of fact it’s something which
might be much more up yoiu street, Mr. Meinetz. A
rather odd thing I came across last night and it reminded
me of our talk last time — about Klein’s bottle and the
strip of paper with only one side — what d’you call it
again? That’s it, the Mobius-strip. Well, this is the Mrs.
O’Neill-box.”

Playing it for effect, I produced the matchbox and,
with a fine conjuror’s flourish, drew out the large hand-
kerchief. He put a polite look on his face. I pulled out
some more things. The look got a little strained. I pulled
out more, and more. The look was chased off his face
by one of suspicion, followed by one of what I can only
describe as boggling, then one of greed. Finally he
arranged an elaborately blank expression on the hard-
worked feattires and stood up.

“ Gimme ” he said.

Well, from then on the matter was out of my hands, of
course. They grudgingly let me print a quarter-column on
what they all thought was some sort of spoof; then, when
the full implications were realised, it was no longer a
matter of local interest and we simply ran a syndicated
front-page. Scoops — ^phooey.

But all that was thirty-five years ago, son. Now, out
here on Deneb IV you’ll find we’ve got quite a reasonable
news-net, what with the thorium mines only two domes
away and the star-port practically on our doorstep. You
can usually get a story of sorts from one or the other,
once you’ve built up a set of reliable contacts. By the
way, for your first job you might just look through this

124

Science Fantasy

Space Board hand-out on the latest model Meinetz-
O’Neill space-warp drive. There might be a quarter-
column in it.

PETER BRADLEY

125

THE GREAT CHAN

by Archie Potts

I suppose you might describe me as a bit of a recluse,
if you take my meaning. Not that I don’t like people or
anything like that, but not many people I meet have my
interests. I mean, most other cigarette-card collectors tend
to be a bit on the young side and the same is true of
match-box tops and bus-tickets. Mine are serious collec-
tions, mind, not schoolboys’ higgledy-piggledy accumula-
tions. I have a genuine love of the old and beautiful and
fading — ^which is why I feel so badly about the old
Empire Theatre. It still stands, of course, in all the lovely
complicated majesty of its Victorian Gothic, but somehow,
now that it’s used for Bungo or whatever they call it and
that coarse wrestling, I can’t enjoy the sight of it any more.

Beautiful, it used to look, in the brave days of music-
hall’s heyday, with all the coloured electrics outside —
not like these eerie neons — and the purple of the com-
missionaire’s nose clashing with the scarlet of his uniform
and the striped pone-cochere and all. All gone now. Nasty
vulgar wrestling-matches.

I’ve seen some of the greatest music-hall acts that ever
graced the boards in the old Empire, bless it. My collection
of old vaudeville programmes is probably one of the finest
in the East Midlands but the finest series in it is from the
Empire. I could always afford a programme because I
mostly had a free ticket, see? — because I did the write-up
in the Bugle, over the pen-name Thespian (classic touch
that, I think).

Well, the night I keep trying to tell you about (well,
that’s very nice of you, perhaps I could fancy a small port,
since you press me) was the very last night of the Empire
before these Bongo people and wrestling nuisances took it
over and tarted it up in their own flashy way. I wouldn’t
have missed that night for a great deal, you may be sure :
a genuine sentimental occasion for me, as you can imagine.
A true cause celebre I described it as in the Bugle (a pretty
turn of phrase, though I say it as shouldn’t). But my sad-

126

Sciaice Fantasy

ness at the melancholy occasion was mollified, shall I say,
by the turns listed on the bill. My word, but they had
done us proud. Going out with a bang, see?

Above all, I was delighted to see the name of the Great
Chan, for I had last seen his act when I was a small boy.
My father had taken the whole family for a Christmas
treat and the memory still lingered with me. Chan had
topped the bill in those days but now it grieved me to see
him half-way down, below an obscure comic, a rowdy
rock-and-roll group and a coarse strip-tease artiste (though
I wouldn’t call her any better than a common you-know-
what). Never mind though, Chan and the others in small
type were well worth enduring the vtilgarians for.

My word, you should have seen Chan that night. As
soon as the band started to play some of the music from
Chu Chin Chow I knew, without a glance at my pro-
gramme, that the Great Chan was next.

The curtains opened on an empty stage. The music
died and then, in one of the smartest trap-door
appearances I have ever seen, the Great Chan materialised
before us in a D jinn-like cloud of smoke.

Chan was dressed in the silken robes of a Chinese
mandarin, and his almond-shaped eyes sparkled in the
glare of the footlights as he bowed to acknowledge our
applause.

Chan pushed his sleeves back and began his act with
some sleight-of-hand tricks. Streams of coloured hand-
kerchiefs were pulled out of the air, ruby wine was made
to flow from empty bottles, and packs of playing cards
appeared and disappeared before our eyes.

It was a routine opening, but it was extremely well done
and drew a mild round of applause.

Chan then snapped his fingers and two assistants dressed
as coolies carried an execution block on to the stage. They
were followed by a girl, dressed in a flimsy Eastern
costume, who laid her head on the block. A third assistant
handed Chan a large axe.

The band had stopped playing and the audience went
very quiet as Chan raised the axe above his head and
brought it flashing down across the nape of the girl’s neck.
As the axe thudded into the block the girl’s head dis-
appeared . . . there was a moment of shocked silence before

The Great Chan

127

the audience — completely fooled — burst into applause.

Chan bowed gravely; “ You will not wish ” he said in
his strongly accented English, “ that our charming young
friend should remain like this.”

To approving shouts from the audience he snapped his
fingers, brought on more assistants with a silver cannon;
applied a torch to the breech and — Presto! — the girl was
on her feet, laughing. We applauded wildly.

The whole act was of this quality. Sensational. Illusion
piled on illusion. Chan’s assistant was sawn up, levitated,
vanished in and out of cabinets and deprived, temporarily,
of most of her limbs. As stage magic it was supreme — I
had never seen anything to compare.

While the music was “ corlang it up ” and Chan was
vanishing in another cloud of smoke, I sidled out of my
seat, found an attendant and asked if Mr. Chan would
interview the Press after the show. He came back and said
that after the next act would be fine, so I sat back and
watched what was a mere anti-climax after Chan’s superb
performance. After the finale, while the new owner was
making a speech about Bango and wrestling (fat fraud)
I made my way to the dressing-room and knocked on
Chan’s door.

He was seated in front of the mirror getting his grease-
paint off, and waved me to a seat without stopping his
work.

“ You won’t mind, I hope, if I carry on with this as we
talk?”

To my surprise, his yellow complexion and almond
eyes were disappearing under the cream as I watched,
revealing unmistakably European features beneath the
make-up. Seeing me stare, he laughed.

“ No, the Chinese guise is just part of the act. People
don’t like an ordinary-looking man performing apparent
miracles so in Europe I always make-up Chinese-style.
When I tour the Far East, of course, I have to wear a
top-hat and tails.”

I complimented him awkwardly on his act and mumbled
something about it being a pity the audience was so small.
He sighed whimsically.

“ The age of magic is almost dead, I fear,” he said

128

Science Fantasy

sadly. “ The magician’s task of creating wonder has been
almost taken over by science. The merest child, weaned on
television, can nowadays sneer at my poor skiU.”

“ I don’t,” I said stoutly.

“ You, sir, are a special case,” he civilly rejoined. For a
moment I wondered whether he was being ironic, but a
moment later was being enthralled with tales of Goldini,
Foo Song, Maskelle and Devine, all of whom he seemed
to have known. (Though looking back on it, I don’t really
see how he could have . . .) I wondered how the closing-
down of Hall after Hall would leave a chap in his line
fixed. He must have been getting really well on in years,
though you would never have known it from his smooth,
waxy face, which didn’t look a day older than when I’d
seen him first. What could he do? The thought of a great
old trouper reduced to entertaining at kiddies’ parties gave
me a horrible turn.

Outside, old Charlie the stage-door keeper was jangling
his keys impatiently out of pure habit, but I could see he
was very much affeaed by the sadness of the occasion:
tears were running down his great old bottle-nose. He very
nearly refused the fiver Mr. Chan palmed out of the air
from behind his ear.

“ Goodnight Mr. Chan,” he croaked, “ and Gord bless
yer.”

“ I say,” I said, greatly daring, as he stepped into his
taxi, “ you can’t really be called Chan. Don’t think me
rude, but might I ask what your real name is? I mean,
I feel we’ve sort of made friends — I mean, I would
count it a great privilege if you — ”

He wound down the taxi window and smiled, for the
first time that evening, with a flash of big, white, square
teeth.

“ Of course I will tell you,” he said. “ It’s Alessandro
Cagliostro.” And his taxi ground off into the dark and
the rain.

I shall always remember him, not only as a first-rate
showman and superb magician, but also as a man whose
sense of humour would never desert him. Cagliostro
indeed.

ARCHIE POTTS

1954-AND HITLER RULES BRITAIN!

London in grey ruins, concentration camps in Hyde Park,
resistance crushed.

How Could It Happen ?

Find Out In

HILARY BAILEY’S

THE FALL OF FRENCHY STEINER

The featured novelette in
the next issue (143) of

NEW WORLDS SF

Also included in the July-August issue :

The conclusion of J. G. Ballard’s
fascinating serial Equinox. American
writer Joseph Green’s Single Combat.

On an alien planet two enemies fight to
the death in what is literally a battle of
minds.

Plus shorter stories by Moorcock, Bounds, Jones etc.
Plus fact features and usual departments.

Out JUNE 24th, Price 2 6.

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Science Fantasy

This Is The New
^SCIENCE FANTASY*

magazine
edited by

KYRIL BONFIGLIOLI

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a bi-monthly collection for
The S-F Connoisseur
In this issue:

“Pink Plastic Gods”

by BRIAN ALDISS

“The Contraption”

by KENNETH BULMER

“ Unauthorised Persons ”

by JOHN RUNCIMAN

and other stories and features including
details of

“Fiction By Scientists”

a competition open to all scientists for
a first prize of £50

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This Is The New
SCIENCE FANTASY

magazine
edited by

KYRIL BONFIGLIOLI

a bi-monthly collection for
The S-F Connoisseur
III this issue:

“Pink Plastic Gods”

by BRIAN ALDISS

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The Contraption

by KENNETH BULMER

“ Unauthorised Persons ”

by JOHN RUNCIMAN

and other stories and features including
details of

“Fiction By Scientists”

a competition open to all scientists for
a first prize of £50

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SCIENCE FANTASY

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SCIENCE

FANTASY

FIVE NEW LONG STORIES

Including

PINK PLASTIC GODS
By Brian W. Aldiss
THE CONTRAPTION
By Kenneth Bulmer

Volume 22
Number 65